Meaning and Container Metaphors

Reading comprehension is, perhaps, the most extensively studied cognitive process and can provide a model that suggests how hypertext may engage its user. But despite the quantity of research done, what occurs during the act of reading is not completely understood. Moreover, what is well understood is often not integrated into the popular understanding and pedagogy of language arts. Reader response theory, of course, became an often-used phrase along with the rise of cognitive research. Essentially, the research of Thorndyke, Johnson-Laird, van Dijk and Kintsch, as well as other cognitive researchers, dismissed the traditional passive conduit metaphor of reading in favor of a paradigm that makes the reader an active participant, a role hypertext makes physically visible. However, in many of these models, information is viewed as being contained or stored in a location -- either in a text or in the reader's mind.

Meaning, in the cognitive models, resides not in the text, but in the reader’s mind. The text does not “input” information but “activates” it, stimulating what the audience already knows or is prepared to intuit, forging new synaptic connections – linking ideas. Although we still tend to test reading comprehension as though it were a skill built on retention, most cognitive theorists believe that comprehension is more closely linked to the ability to predict: the more accurate a user’s predictions, the easier the connections to the reader’s existing knowledge, the smoother the reading process. How these connections are made is still uncertain, and theories vary concerning the degree to which information is “webbed.” More conservative connectivist theory, for example, may be best understood by looking at the work of thinkers like E.D. Hirsh. When the reader encounters a concept in a text, according to this connectivist model, it searches its memory banks for the node containing the matching concept. If the mind does not find that match, according to this theory, the whole process is derailed. Comprehension and interpretation stop – Data Missing, page not found.