Examples of Word Boundaries

"When I was very young, my mother scolded me for flatulating by saying, 'Johnny, who made an odor?' I
misheard her euphemism as 'who made a motor?' For days I ran around the house amusing myself with
those delicious words." (John B. Lee, Building Bicycles in the Dark: A Practical Guide on How to Write.
Black Moss Press, 2001

"I could have sworn I heard on the news that the Chinese were producing new trombones. No, it was
neutron bombs." (Doug Stone, quoted by Rosemarie Jarski in Dim Wit: The Funniest, Stupidest Things
Ever Said. Ebury, 2008

"As far as input processing is concerned, we may also recognize slips of the ear, as when we start to hear
a particular sequence and then realize that we have misperceived it in some way; e.g. perceiving the
ambulance at the start of the yam balanced delicately on the top . . .." (Michael Garman,
Psycholinguistics. Cambridge University Press, 2000

Word Recognition

"The usual criterion for word recognition is that suggested by the linguist Leonard Bloomfield, who
defined a word as 'a minimal free form.' . . .

"The concept of a word as 'a minimal free form' suggests two important things about words. First, their
ability to stand on their own as isolates. This is reflected in the space which surrounds a word in its
orthographical form. And secondly, their internal integrity, or cohesion, as units. If we move a word
around in a sentence, whether spoken or written, we have to move the whole word or none of it--we
cannot move part of a word."

(Geoffrey Finch, Linguistic Terms, and Concepts. Palgrave Macmillan, 2000)

"[T]he great majority of English nouns begins with a stressed syllable. Listeners use this expectation
about the structure of English and partition the continuous speech stream employing stressed syllables."

(Z.S. Bond, "Slips of the Ear." The Handbook of Speech Perception, ed. by David Pisoni and Robert
Remez. Wiley-Blackwell, 2005)

Tests of Word Identification

Potential pause: Say a sentence out loud, and ask someone to 'repeat it very slowly, with pauses.' The
pauses will tend to fall between words, and not within words. For example, the / three / little / pigs /
went / to / market. . . .

Indivisibility: Say a sentence out loud, and ask someone to 'add extra words' to it. The extra item will be
added between the words and not within them. For example, the pig went to market might become the
big pig once went straight to the market. . . .
Phonetic boundaries: It is sometimes possible to tell from the sound of a word where it begins or ends.
In Welsh, for example, long words generally have their stress on the penultimate syllable . . .. But there
are many exceptions to such rules.

Semantic units: In the sentence Dog bites vicar, there are plainly three units of meaning, and each unit
corresponds to a word. But language is often not as neat as this. In I switched on the light, the has little
clear 'meaning,' and the single action of 'switching on' involves two words.

(Adapted from The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 3rd ed., by David Crystal. Cambridge
University Press, 2010)