woordbeeld

Woordbeeld is a Dutch term used in linguistics and education to describe the mental representation of the orthographic form of a word—the way a word is written and stored in the reader’s or speaker’s mental lexicon. It is often contrasted with klankbeeld, the corresponding phonological representation or how a word sounds. In reading and spelling, woordbeeld refers to the ability to recognize and reproduce the correct spelling of a word as a single unit, rather than decoding it letter by letter.

In pedagogy, the concept highlights how learners build a stored image of a word’s spelling through repeated exposure and practice. Strengthening woordbeeld supports sight recognition and fluent writing, and it operates alongside phonological processing in reading and spelling tasks. The term also appears in linguistic descriptions of lexical entries, where the orthographic form is part of the word’s information in the mental lexicon.

The scope of woordbeeld can include information about capitalization, hyphenation, and inflectional or derivational variants that affect spelling in context. While the core form of a word may be stable, spelling irregularities, loanwords, and dialectal differences can influence the exact representation stored as woordbeeld. Overall, woordbeeld is a key concept in understanding how written language is processed and produced, complementing phonological knowledge in literacy development.