Award Winners

Art Graesser’s contributions to the field of text and discourse are substantial, impactful, and unique. He has been one of the leading researchers in the fields of text comprehension, question answering, and intelligent tutoring systems. Art has been at the heart of the Society for Text and Discourse by playing a role in its inception in 1990, helping found the Society’s journal Discourse Processes (1978), serving as editor of the journal (1996-2005), and presiding over the society (2007-2010). Art’s unparalleled quest for interdisciplinary research is evidenced by collaborations and publications in over a half-dozen diverse research areas. He has published over 500 scholarly writings, has authored two books, and edited eleven books. He has secured over 30 million in grant funds, and has designed, developed, and tested cutting-edge software in learning, language, emotion, and discourse technologies. Art’s outstanding research legacy is paralleled only by his reputation as a wonderful mentor and loyal friend.

Herb Clark's empirical and theoretical contributions to the psychology of language and discourse are wide-ranging, important, and enduring. His early work on sentence comprehension and memory, bridging inferences, and linguistic processes in deductive reasoning is seminal. His 1977 textbook with Eve Clark, Psychology of Language, remained, for decades, a definitive overview of the field. Likewise, his 1996 monograph, Using Language, is a classic, as are numerous handbook chapters. More recent work on politeness, speech acts, and referring has led to his well-known collaborative theory of language, challenging much traditional work in psycholinguistics. Herb Clark is an inspiring mentor. Many of his students and postdoctoral researchers have made substantial contributions to the field of text and discourse. Perhaps most remarkable about Herb Clark's work is its reception in many fields of inquiry beyond psycholinguistics, promoting progress in human-computer interaction, social psychology, communication, and linguistics. Herb Clark’s work demonstrates an unparalleled appreciation of both the cognitive and social dimensions in language.

Dr. Walter Kintsch is a pre-eminent scholar and founder of contemporary research on discourse processing and text analysis. For decades, he has contributed important ideas and methods such as the propositional analysis of text, levels of discourse representation, the construction-integration model, and applications of latent semantic analysis to discourse representation. These contributions have appeared in landmark Psychological Review articles and in books such as The representation of meaning (1974), Strategies of discourse comprehension (1983), and Comprehension (1998). In addition, he has provided service and leadership by training a new generation of scholars, by serving as editor of journals such as the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior and Psychological Review and by serving as chair or president of numerous psychological societies. His contributions have been acknowledged with two festschrifts, the American Psychological Association’s (1992) highest honor, and an honorary doctorate from the Humboldt University in Berlin (2001). The Society is truly grateful and indebted to Dr. Kintsch for his contributions.