Warping
As the word suggests, warping is the bending of something. When applied in psycholinguistics, it essentially means that the way words are learned is warped rather than being simple and straight forward. For this reason, warping creates a warping perceptual space. With such a perceptual space present when learning new words, it gives learner boundaries. These are boundaries within which some words exist.
The motivation of the world warping was, therefore, to ensure that learners have a key focus and a standardized way they can use when learning new words. The methods of learning new words via warping entail three main steps. The first step is the learning of new words. Such knowledge expands with time as one grows up or in school when exposed to many other concepts. The next step is the representation. In representation, the learner recognizes that many words vary either in spelling or sounding. It is a situation known as quasiregular. The last and most crucial step is a generalization. In this final step, the learner is then able to use the existing knowledge to pronounce similar words. The result of this is that when a learner is exposed to other new words daily, they can declare them as a result of all the three stages that culminated in the generalization stage.
The implication for language researchers is that they find words that may not have other similar terms that give the quasiregular relationship. Some words give learners difficulty from the second stage onwards. Narrowing down on the list of words with the characteristics mentioned above is prudent. It is then that the language researchers can narrow down to those words that can be helpful to students both within and outside school, and ensure that they master them.