Abstract

Viewed from the perspective of psycholinguistics, words are fairly magical entities, representing the psychological level at which twenty-six meaningless letters coalesce into thousands of meaningful units. Many choose only to study word-recognition itself, modeling RT data gathered from lexical decision or naming tasks. Others choose to follow the linguistic pathways higher, studying how words are integrated into syntactic or semantic levels of discourse. In either circumstance, words are typically treated in a manner consistent with linguistic theory — as abstract, canonical units that may be recombined to create endless messages. Word recognition is appreciated for its stability across visual or auditory variations, and is theoretically likened to finding entries in a computer search or activating the proper node in a network.