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Word Recognition: History
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Word recognition is the process by which a language user identifies a linguistic form as a known word and accesses information associated with it in the mental lexicon [1][2]. In psycholinguistics, the term encompasses the identification of spoken words from acoustic input and written words from visual input, involving the activation and integration of orthographic, phonological, morphological, and lexical-semantic information as required by the task and theoretical model [1]. Word recognition is distinguished from initial sensory analysis, such as the detection of visual features or speech sounds, and from subsequent processes of sentence-level interpretation, although these processes can interact during language comprehension [2]. The term therefore refers specifically to the identification of lexical items and the retrieval or activation of their stored linguistic representations, rather than to the complete process of understanding an utterance or text.

  • lexical access
  • visual word recognition
  • spoken word recognition
  • mental lexicon

References

  1. Andrea Weber; Odette Scharenborg; Models of spoken‐word recognition. WIREs Cogn. Sci. 2012, 3, 387-401, 10.1002/wcs.1178.
  2. Marcus Taft; Lexical access codes in visual and auditory word recognition. Lang. Cogn. Process. 1986, 1, 297-308, 10.1080/01690968608404679.
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