Defines quantitative-discourse psychology. Illustrates its practice in five research projects, all of which examined naturalistic discourse, investigating: reading time; inference generation; construction of multiple agents (narrators, characters) in literary short stories; tutorial dialog; and dialog patterns in two-party conversations. Notes a…

Describes the seven main components of QUEST, a cognitive model of question answering that attempts to simulate the answers adults produce when they answer different types of questions, both closed class and open class. Illustrates how the model could be applied to different types of knowledge structures, including causal networks, goal…

Tests the QUEST model of question answering in naturalistic settings and in settings with complex pragmatic constraints: telephone surveys, business interactions, filmed interviews, and interviews on popular television programs. Finds that QUEST explains most of the answers in these contexts and virtually all of the answers that refer to the…