Learning and using written word forms

Over most of human history, knowing a word has involved knowing its phonological form. Nowadays, for people who are literate, knowing a word means knowing its written form as well. The goal of this chapter is to discuss how people learn and use these forms. The chapter begins by considering how writing systems represent language in a visual form. The next section of the chapter takes up the processes that are involved in skilled reading, considering how experienced readers perform the secondary linguistic task of reading as well and quickly as they do. How children learn to read and spell is also considered. The final section of the chapter discusses how the learning of orthographic representations can affect the mental lexicon.