Most of us spend a good part of our days either reading or writing, so it is surprising that the psychological study of these processes is a relative late comer. The investigation of learning processes began with memorizing lists of nonsense syllables and running rats down mazes, not with what we do everyday—reading all kinds of things. The study of thinking started with puzzles of various kinds, not with the kind of inferences that are made in reading. The reason is, of course, obvious: Investigators were put off by the daunting complexity of studying discourse comprehension. Historically, such study has been the domain of linguists, rhetoricians, and literary.
