ABSTRACT
The linking theme between the chapters in this book is that they all focus on words, and most of them are concerned solely with visual word recognition. The authors present a variety of different views about how words are represented and processed and use a wide range of methods to illustrate and substantiate their claims. But few of them feel the need to justify conducting a research programme focused entirely on the processing of written words. Literacy is crucially important in modern societies, and it is taken as selfevident that identification of written words is fundamental to literacy. In this chapter, I want to stand back from the detailed accounts of visual word recognition discussed in other chapters and focus on a more functional level of analysis.
