Applying theories that have been developed to understand text comprehension to political framing, this study is to contribute to the development of a theoretical account of the way in which framing effects occur. By far the most developed theories of text comprehension involve mental models. Based on the landscape model within the broader mental models approach, this study argues that framing effects of media texts like political advertisements can be understood ? at least in part ? as a consequence of comprehension processes and the resulting mental models that are constructed during comprehension. The findings substantiate that people do construct different mental models for the different interpretations of the political advertisements framed differently. It is suggested that a process concerning the changes of relevancy of the concepts in the audiences’ memory plays a key role in the conception activations and the subsequent comprehension processes in the effects of framing.