ABSTRACT
There are many ways to examine the process of understanding linguistic material, whether presented as speech or as written material. These different points of view can be seen in terms of a number of different levels of representation, stretching from meaning to sound or print. One can, at the top level, look at meaning as it is conveyed by large regions of text or by individual sentences and distinguish literal meaning from intended interpretations simply within the level of meaning. Lower down, one may examine sentence syntax and how syntax and semantics operate within sentences at the level of the clause. Words form the point where semantics and the conceptual level are related to syntactic roles, all of which are mapped onto single entities we call words. Under the word level we can distinguish different levels which are linguistically significant and often undervalued in the study of written language comprehension. These are the levels of morphology and phonology and their interactions.
