In yet another layer of complexity, readers also create for themselves an idea
of what the text is about before they read it. In reading, prediction is much
more important than decoding. In fact, if we had to read each letter and
word, we couldn't possibly remember the letters and words long enough
to put them all together to make sense of a sentence. And reading larger
chunks than sentences would be absolutely impossible with our limited
short-term memories.
So, instead of looking at each word and figuring out what it "means," readers rely
on all their language and discourse knowledge to predict what a text is about.
Then we sample the text to confirm, revise, or discard that hypothesis. More
highly structured texts with topic sentences and lots of forecasting features are
easier to hypothesize about; they're also easier to learn information from. Less
structured texts that allow lots of room for predictions (and revised and
discarded hypotheses) give more room for creative meanings constructed
by readers. Thus we get office memos or textbooks or entertaining novels.
Back to Cognitive Reading Theory