Words

Words, words, words

‘Words, words, words.’ This was Hamlet’s reply to Polonius’ question, ‘What do you read, my lord?’ (Shakespeare, 1603) [1]. By repeating the word three times, Hamlet suggests that what he is reading is meaningless. Before launching the journal Archives of Public Health, we have asked ourselves: ‘Do we not already produce too many words too many journals?’ or in other words ‘What is the added va...

"Words, words, words".

The aim of this paper is to call to attention a very large and important area of human factors engineering that is almost entirely neglected. This area consists of the language and the words that are attached to the tools, machines, systems, and operations with which human factors engineers are concerned. Examples, illustrations, and data are cited to show that changes in the words used in man-...

"clustering Words" Clustering Words Clustering Words

Real Words, Possible Words, and New Words

Phonologists and psycholinguists draw a three-way distinction amongst real words, possible words, and impossible words.The distinction between real words and possible words provides the foundation for lexical decision experiments. The distinction between possible words and impossible words reveals implicit cognitive generalizations about words in a language, and thereby contributes to the under...

Hard Words 1 Hard Words

How do children acquire the meaning of words? And why are words like know harder for learners to acquire than words like dog or jump? We suggest that a considerable part of the difficulty of acquiring the vocabulary of natural languages consists not in overcoming conceptual difficulties with abstract word meanings but rather in mapping these meanings onto their corresponding lexical forms. We s...