Treatment and resolution of inconsistencies in reading

Understanding a written text is a complex cognitive activity that all adults are considered capable of doing. (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995 ; Kintsch, 1998). This capability rests mainly on the fact that while reading the individual quickly and easily accesses elements that have been previously encountered as well as their personal general world knowledge. In addition, one of the major goals in this domain is to examine the conditions which allow information stocked in long term memory to become available to the reader while reading a text.
After a brief review of the existing data, I will present an initial series of work that completes that data. This collection of studies allows us to distinguish the characteristics of the retrieval process used during text comprehension. Secondly, I will turn to the way in which readers resolve inconsistencies encountered in texts. In fact, introducing contradictory information into experimental texts has become one of the classic methods used to study information accessing in long term memory during reading. The current studies attempt to answer two related and important questions:
(1) What are the resolution processes or strategies put in place by the reader when confronted with contradictory textual information?
(2) What consequences do such processes have on the reader's understanding of subsequent information provided in the text?