Walter Kintsch

Walter Kintsch is Professor Emeritus of Psychology and the former Director of the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He came to the University of Colorado in 1968 after receiving a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Kansas and faculty appointments at the University of Missouri and the University of California at Riverside. His research focus has been on the study of how people understand language, using both experimental methods and computational modeling techniques. In cooperation with the Dutch linguist Teun van Dijk, he formulated the first psychological process theory of discourse comprehension in 1978. In 1988, this work was reformulated as a constraint-satisfaction process. His book Comprehension” appeared in 1998 and argues that many cognitive processes can be usefully conceptualized as comprehension processes. Kintsch received a Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association in 1992 and from the Society for Text & Discourse in 2008. He received an honorary doctorate from the Humboldt University in Berlin in 2001. Dr. Kintsch can be reached at walter.kintsch@colorado.edu.