34th Annual Meeting
Society for Text & Discourse
Water Tower Campus, Loyola University Chicago
July 17-19, 2024
Welcome to Chicago!
Once again, the Society for Text & Discourse returns to its origins in Chicago. In 1991, Tom Trabasso, Art Graesser, and Bruce Britton spearheaded the first official meeting of the Society, held on the campus of the University of Chicago. It was a one-day meeting during which psycholinguists, experimental psychologists, linguists, computational linguists, natural language and artificial intelligence researchers, developmentalists, education and assessment researchers with interests in text and discourse processing made five-minute “fire hose” presentations. We see the same mix of research in our Society today. The strengths of the Society are also reflected in the official journal of the Society, Discourse Processes, which now includes a yearly issue based on presentations at the conference. Originally founded and edited by Roy Freedle who passed away this year, Art Graesser became the Editor-in-Chief in 1994. The journal has continued to flourish under Michael Schober, David Rapp, and current editors, Catherine Bohn-Gettler and Joanna Kaakinen.
We are excited to be gathering again for an in-person conference, our first in North America in 5 years. We look forward to the intellectual exchange and comraderie that are the hallmarks of our Society. A meeting of this size and scope does not happen without the work of many people. We especially thank Tricia Guerrero and Perla Gamez for all of their efforts dealing with the many logistics of this conference, and Mike Wolfe for putting together two excellent sessions to honor the memory of Walter Kintsch. We thank the reviewers for their constructive feedback on submissions, Laura Allen and all the mentors who shared their time at the mentoring session, members who are serving as session chairs, all of the student volunteers who are helping to make the conference happen, and Scott Hinze for helping with all of the coordination of the Society’s apps and committees. As always, we are indebted to Taylor & Francis for their support of the Society and the annual meeting in particular, and we thank Loyola University Chicago Department of Psychology for serving as sponsor and host of this year’s conference. Finally, we thank each and every one of you for your participation in this meeting. We hope you have a wonderful visit to Chicago!
M. Anne Britt and Jennifer Wiley Program Chairs, Society for Text & Discourse, 2024
Future Meetings of the Society for Text & Discourse
The 35th Annual Meeting will be held in Padua, Italy from July 7-9, 2025. Call for papers: November 2024
Winter Text 2025 will be held in Boulder, Colorado, USA. February 3-5, 2025. Call for papers: July 2024