ABSTRACT
Linguistic and psychological characterizations of a writing system are contrasted. It is argued that little progress can be made on purely formal grounds toward the definition of optimality in an orthography, or toward decisions about how the orthography is treated by the information-processing reader. A distinction is then drawn between the representation and the delimitation by an orthography of various levels of linguistic unit and the utility of delimiting certain types of segment is considered. In a speculative concluding section, distinctive aspects of written language are examined, leading to some musings on the cognitive consequences of literacy.
