ABSTRACT
A newspaper once carried the headline “Lead Boat Sinks in Solo Race”. I remember staring at this strange sentence and finally concluding that it was no great surprise. Any boat made from lead would obviously sink. It was only a subsequent reading of the sentence that enabled me to make sense: “lead” refers to being in front, not to the metal. “Lead” is one of a small class of words in English that is a heterophone; one letter pattern, two or more sounds. This contrasts with the high frequency of homophones in our language; words with the same sound but different spellings (e.g. “sale”, “sail”). The reason that the above headline causes problems is because “lead” is presented without any preceding context and, as a result, we opt for the commonest meaning (a metal) on our initial encounter. The fact that we are rarely aware of the potential ambiguity of words tells us that our word recognition system is very efficient in that it only allows through the meaning relevant to what we are reading or listening. A good example is the word “game” we considered in Chapter 8. Our ability to resolve ambiguity effortlessly under most circumstances is one of the many aspects of word recognition we will be considering in this chapter. However, our starting point will be where we first encounter words—the eye.
