Lois Letchford, Nicholas Letchford: The word "saw" and Comprehension

3 Jul 2020 · 1 min

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In this brief excerpt from a YouTube video, speaker Lois Letchford recounts a personal childhood struggle with learning to read, focusing on how words with multiple meanings caused confusion. She illustrates this with the sentence “I saw a cat,” which she initially interpreted as describing the act of cutting a cat with a saw, rather than the past tense of “see.” The anecdote highlights the challenges that lexical ambiguity poses for early reading comprehension and underscores the logical reasoning she employed to make sense of the sentence.

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So I remember an example of having trouble learning to read was sentences with words that had double meaning to them, such as, I saw a cat. For the longest period, I remember thinking a sentence like that could only mean that you were cutting the cat in half, quite literally, because there was the word saw in there. And that was the only logical conclusion that you could come to that sentence, because why would would you have multiple words to multiple meanings?