Reading comprehension is widely agreed to be not one, but many things. At
the least, it is agreed to entail cognitive processes that operate on many different
kinds of knowledge to achieve many different kinds of reading tasks.
Emerging from the apparent complexity, however, is a central idea: Comprehension
occurs as the reader builds one or more mental representations of a
text message (e.g., Kintsch & Rawson, 2005). Among these representations,
an accurate model of the situation described by the text (Van Dijk & Kintsch,
1983) is the product of successful deep comprehension.