Thinking aloud: Telling a story about a story

Abstract

In this commentary, we provide a rationale for the use of verbal protocols in the study of discourse processing. We argue that readers do not provide a veridical report of their underlying mental processes when they “think aloud” during text comprehension. Rather, they construct a text representation and then use it to “tell a story” about their understanding. This story reveals important information about the processes involved in text comprehension as well as those involved in constructing a message to be understood in a context shared by the speaker and listener. We describe how this view leads to interesting hypotheses about (a) inferential processing during comprehension, (b) individual differences in comprehension performance, and (c) the processes involved in conversational discourse and storytelling.