Understanding a text requires building a mental representation that is coherent. This mental representation, commonly called a situation model (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983) or a mental model (Johnson-Laird, 1983), is the result of an interaction between the reader’s prior knowledge and information in the text. One of my goals is to define what objects or entities compose the situational level of representation and what main processes are implemented by the reader to understand a text.
