ABSTRACT
If we give a sentence, either in written or spoken form, to a group of English speakers (or speakers of any other European language) and ask them to count the number of words in the sentence, what would happen? In most cases, the task would be considered very easy, and there would be no difference in the results of counting, even among different people. This result would not surprise anyone, because, after all, words are units that are widely used in daily life. For instance, individual words are one of the fundamental blocks on which reading acquisition is built and are listed as basic entries in dictionaries, let alone the fact that word boundaries are clearly marked by spaces in writing. Hence, it is quite obvious that words are transparent language units for speakers of European languages. It is, therefore, no wonder that the question of how words are processed has been a major focus of psychological research ever since Cattell (1886).
