Walter Kintsch


Walter Kintsch is an American Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He is renowned for his groundbreaking theories in cognitive psychology, especially in relation to text comprehension.

Early life

Walter Kintsch was born in Timișoara, raised in Austria and received his PhD at the University of Kansas in 1960.

Research

His research focus has been on the study of how people understand language, using both experimental methods and computational modeling techniques. He formulated a psychological process theory of discourse comprehension that views comprehension as a bottom-up process in which various alternatives are explored in parallel, resulting in an incoherent intermediate mental representation that is then cleaned up by an integration process. Integration is a constraint satisfaction process that ensures that those constructions that are linked together become strongly activated, whereas contradictory and irrelevant elements become deactivated.

Awards