The primary form of word recognition is instant recognition, in which a person sees a word and immediately recalls its meaning. For example, a person may read the word "bougainvillea" and immediately picture a flower. Children, who are developing their word recognition skills, may use flash cards or reading exercises to develop their skills. In addition to recognizing words and meanings, pronunciation is also taught to children at this time.
A study by Johnson & Baumann in 1984 demonstrated the way in which people recognize words through context clues. The three types of context clues are semantic clues, syntactical clues and pictures. Pictures may lend clues as to a passage or sentence's meaning. Semantic clues are gained by examining the overall topic of a piece of writing. For example, if an article is about horses, then a person could infer that the word "gallop" refers to the way in which a horse runs. Syntactical clues refer to looking at where a word fits in a sentence to determine whether it is a noun, verb, adjective or other part of speech. Detecting patterns of meaning of a piece of writing help hone word recognition skills.
The structure of words also help people develop their word recognition skills. Prefixes, suffixes and root words lend clues as to a word's meaning, and these can help a person guess what a word refers to. For example, a man may not know the meaning of the word "aimless," but he might know that the suffix "less" means without. Therefore, he could infer that the word means without aim. This natural process of assessing the prefixes, suffixes and roots of words occurs subconsciously as we read words and determine their meaning.
Because pronunciation is a component of word recognition, analogies can help lend clues on the pronunciation of certain words. For example, a person might know how the word "bright" is pronounced, and so she can infer how the word "light" is pronounced, even though she has never seen it before. This type of association is called phonemic awareness. This helps people use their existing base of knowledge to explore and learn new words.