ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how words are identified in reading and listening. The purpose of having recognition units is, of course, to allow words to make contact with the representations of their meanings which are stored in the reader's semantic system. This semantic system is commonly assumed to be the same one that initiates speech production. This provides us with a mechanism for reading words aloud via the semantic system and then the speech output lexicon. Turning to speech perception, Bagley conducted auditory experiments similar in conception to Pillsbury's visual ones. In Bagley's experiments, words and sentences were recorded upon the cylinders of an Edison phonograph but some words were mutilated by omitting consonants. There is quite a long tradition of work seeking to demonstrate that words a reader or listener has no conscious awareness of having seen or heard can still be shown to have been recognized and understood at some level.
