Abstract
The Construction-Integration (CI) Model (Kintsch 1988, 1992, 1998a; Kintsch & Welsch, 1991) is a cognitive architecture of comprehension. It is a hybrid model that comprises the construction phase employing weak symbolic rules and the integration phase with a connectionist constraint-satisfaction algorithm. In the CI Model, comprehension emerges from an interaction between the text to be comprehended and the comprehender's knowledge and episodic memory. This article first provides an overview of the model. It then shows how the CI model can simulate discourse comprehension processes to qualitatively account for empirical data from studies on inference generation. In so doing, the author points out a simplifying assumption about the construction process of a working-memory representation in the simulation and argues that the construction phase itself can be characterized as the repetitive application of construction and integration. The paper then discusses a modification to the model by introducing the incremental construction-integration procedure and presents a case study that illustrates what insights this refinement gives into simulating inference processing.
