ABSTRACT
The idea that both letters and words are recognized in the same way, through the discrimination of elements of written language (called distinctive features) that are even smaller than a letter, doesn’t usually cause too much difficulty. Although our immediate intuitions may be to the contrary, it isn’t hard to grasp that if individual letters are recognized on the basis of distinctive features, then words themselves should be distinguishable from each other by virtue of the same features, without the intervening necessity to identify letters. But the next step will probably be a little harder to grasp. When we identify meaning in text, it is not necessary to identify individual words. We can make sense of text directly from the distinctive features of the print, from those same distinctive features in the ink marks on the page that we can employ for the recognition of letters and words.
