---
id: hay26_interspeech
title: What does it mean to ‘know a word’?
authors:
  - Jennifer Hay
year: 2026
isca_url: https://www.isca-archive.org/interspeech_2026/hay26_interspeech.html
pdf_url: https://www.isca-archive.org/interspeech_2026/hay26_interspeech.pdf
session: "Keynote3 - Jennifer Hay: What does it mean to ‘know a word’?"
topics:
  - phonetics
  - low-resource
category: phonetics-linguistics
institutions:
  - University of Canterbury
code:
  url: ""
  license: ""
open_to_collaboration: false
wiki_frontmatter:
  id: hay26_interspeech
  category: phonetics-linguistics
  institutions:
    - University of Canterbury
  updated: 2026-09-28
  confidence: abstract-only
  source: https://www.isca-archive.org/interspeech_2026/hay26_interspeech.html
wiki_url: https://interspeech-2026-wiki.vercel.app/papers/hay26_interspeech/
markdown_url: https://interspeech-2026-wiki.vercel.app/papers/hay26_interspeech/markdown.md
---

# What does it mean to 'know a word'?

**Category:** `phonetics-linguistics`

**TL;DR** — A keynote talk arguing that word knowledge spans a far wider continuum than usually assumed, from implicit awareness of words in a language one doesn't speak to richly detailed phonetic/social memory for highly familiar words.

## Problem

Existing accounts of 'knowing a word' describe a continuum from passive recognition to complex contextual usage, but this talk argues the continuum should extend further in both directions than commonly studied.

## Method

Drawing on corpus and experimental studies of te reo Māori and English, the talk examines implicit knowledge of words in an unspoken but ambiently-heard language, alongside detailed phonetic and social information stored for highly familiar words and used in speech perception.

## Results

The work shows people can develop implicit knowledge that a word exists without conscious awareness (even for an unspoken language), and that familiar words carry rich phonetic/social detail that structures individual variation and informs listener perception.

## Code

None released (as of this page's `updated` date). If you are an author with a repo, please claim this entry — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

## Applications

Relevant to psycholinguists and phonologists studying lexical representation, language exposure effects, and models of speech perception that go beyond simple word-meaning mappings.

## Institutions / 機構

University of Canterbury

## Related

- No closely related Interspeech 2026 papers found.

<sub>All 950k paper pairs scored by TypeSafe Jev (`scripts/related/`); relatedness 0 = unrelated … 3 = directly comparable.</sub>