The role of short-term memory in discourse comprehension: some reflections on the impact of Kintsch and van Dijk (1978)

The limited capacity of the short-term working memory system is a major cognitive bottleneck that limits our ability to create a coherent mental representation of a text. The earliest cognitive models of comprehension proposed top-down, schema-based solutions to this problem. In 1978, Walter Kintsch, in collaboration with Teun van Dijk, offered a more-bottom-up approach. The goal of this commentary is to both place this contribution in context and explore some of the research that it inspired.