This volume is derived from presentations given at a conference hosted in Boulder, Colorado in honor of the 60th birthday of Walter Kintsch. Though the contents of the talks, and thus the chapters, varied widely, all had one thing in common -- they were inspired to some degree by the work of Walter Kintsch. When making plans for an edited book centered around this conference, the editors had a primary goal: to acknowledge the wide variety of researchers and research areas Kintsch had influenced. As a consequence, one of the more unusual elements of this volume is the diversity of the contributors.

Researchers from six different countries contributed chapters to this book which is loosely organized around three main thrusts of Kintsch's work:

* text-based representations that explain how meaning in a text is constructed,

* situation models which represent what the text is about rather than what a text literally says, and

* the construction-integration model, Kintsch's most recent work in discourse comprehension.