A different academic tradition which has contributed a great deal to the
structural analysis of prose passages is psychological work on the cognitive
processing of discourse. Both the overall macrostructure of narratives,
descriptions, explanations and the like, and also the micropropositional
development of texts from sentence to sentence, are seen as cognitive
schemas which play an important part in the comprehension and production
of texts. Mandler and Johnson (1977) and Van Dijk and Kintsch (1978)
provide useful reviews of this work. And examples of applied educational
studies are provided by Stein and Glenn (1979) who investigate young
children's comprehension of stories, and by Waters (1980) who provides a
case study of a single child's written production over a year. Much of this
work is within the cognitive psychological approach to studying memory,
which is defined as the ability to recall the semantic content of texts. This
derives from the classic work of Bartlett (1932) who showed that remembering
a story is not mere repetition, but an active process of interpretation and
reconstruction based on familiar structures and standard story schemas.