Understanding intertextual comprehension

Intertextual understanding is a complex cognitive activity that requires readers to engage in various processes and representations. In addition to a content-based representation (inference-driven content-to-content connections), intertextual understanding also demands that individuals co-activate the origins of statements – on the one hand, extracting them as their own interpretative product (source-to-source connections) and, on the other, combining them with content through source-to-content connections. Intertextual understanding can therefore be modelled as a network. This article explores the concept from a theory-based product perspective and, drawing on the typology of document models, characterises the cognitive processes that individuals must theoretically perform, those they have empirically demonstrated, and the research questions that remain open.