Comprehension is a process that occurs within the reader and is at least partially dependent on cohesion and coherence. The concept of cohesion is used to show how sentences which are structurally independent of one another may be linked together. Cohesion exists within a text and is not the same as coherence, which is something the reader establishes in the process of reading and which may be viewed as the cognitive correlate of cohesion. In order for a text to be coherent it must have both cohesion and organization. While cohesion is considered to be a measureable linguistic phenomenon, coherence is more global and not as directly amenable to evaluation. The importance of cohesion in text is major since it provides semantic continuity and permits coherence and comprehensibility. The more implicit cohesive relationships are, the more difficult a text is to understand. Thus, explicitness and comprehensibility are highly related. When a reader is unable to establish coherence from the text, then the normal cognitive processes are stopped so that the reader's long-term memory can be searched. The more inferences the text requires, the heavier the processing load for the reader and the more difficult it is to comprehend. (TJ)