ABSTRACT
For once we don’t need a dictionary to tell us what a word is, but the rest of the process isn’t as clear. Note that I began by saying “doing something with words”. I’ve also been a bit sneaky using words such as “recognise”, and “understand” and “identify”, without really explaining them. It’s time to unpack these ideas a little. Let’s think about our goal when listening or reading: it’s getting enough meaning from the words to be able to construct a representation of the meaning of the sentence, which we can then use to do something with. Recognising a word means you’ve made a decision in some way that the word is familiar; you know that NIGHT is a word and you’ve seen it before, and you know that NITE isn’t. Strictly speaking, recognition doesn’t necessarily entail anything more: you could in principle decide something’s a word you know and not do anything more with it. Identifying a word means that you’ve made some commitment to what the word is – sufficiently so to be able to initiate some response. Understanding a word means that you access the word’s meaning. Naming a word is accessing the sound of a word, which in turn could mean saying it aloud, or saying it to yourself. When we’re reading, do we automatically and necessarily access the sounds of the word? And then there’s a term much liked by psycholinguists, lexical access: that means accessing our mental dictionary, the lexicon, and obtaining potentially all knowledge about the word – its meaning, sound, appearance, and syntactic information about it.
