The depths of comprehesion: the inter-relations between interpretation, meaning and understanding

Abstract

Reading and understanding are interdependent cognitive tasks extremely important for the academic and social life of the individual, and can’t be ignored by the research. So, the importance of scrutinizing this basic connection originates from its dissociation in a large number of common situations. There are readers – young people or adults – who learn to put syllables together and make a synthesis of the word, laboriously, without being able to read with fluency. The number of readers who don’t overcome this initial phase of reading – the decoded - is so high, in Brazil, that it is necessary to discuss the basis of the relationships between reading, understanding, interpreting, and linguistic meaning in order to find out what is going on, since the questions that follow rely exactly on bad results of local and international reading tests obtained by Brazilian students: what is missing to enable students to read in an efficient way? For understanding, is it necessary to know the meaning of all the words used in the text? Understanding and interpreting are identical cognitive activities? Comprehension and meaning are related terms? For most people, the answers to those questions don’t require much thinking. Someone is failing: the school, the students, the teachers, the parents. For the cognitive science, however, the issue is not so simple and requires a careful consideration. Thus, this work intends to ponder about the ideas of some scholars who theorize about interpretation, comprehension and meaning. More precisely, in order to analyze such concepts, we will accomplish a review of the work of Marcelo Dascal, in the book Interpretation and understanding (2006), comparing and complementing his ponderings with those of other researchers of the area.