These lexical ties can occur over long passages of text or discourse. The primary typical types of lexical cohesion are reiteration (repetition), synonymy, and hyponymy.
The comprehension of a passage or text is based on the given/new information of the sentences. According to this, we comprehend a sentence by dividing it, into two parts, containing information which is known to us (given information) and that which is not known (new information). The Given/New strategy is a tree step process of understanding sentences in a discourse. In the first step the listener isolates the given and the new information in the current sentence; second step, the listener searches their memory for a direct antecedent; at the third step the listener integrates the new information into the memory structure by attaching it to the antecedent found in the second step. Sometimes, however, the listener does not have obvious antecedent from previous sentences creating a comprehension difficulty.
Some of the strategies to solve comprehension difficulties in the sentence relations are; Direct Matching, Bridging, Reinstating Old Information and Identifying New Topics of Discourse. Direct matching refers to matching concepts earlier introduced in the discourse. It is when the target sentence directly matches an antecedent in the context sentence. Bridging occurs when the listener is not able to find a direct match for the given information but is capable of constructing a bridge between what was known and what was treated as given. Reinstating old information is used when a sentence refers to something or someone already introduced but no longer in the foreground. Identifying a new topic of discourse can happen when the information is new and the listener is meant to establish a new topic. .
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Individual difference in working memory has an impact in how a discourse is understood. Research has found that people with a smaller reading span have a smaller working memory capacity, making it hard to understand more than a few sentences back.
