Bell (1991: 16) has illustrated this processing by the following figure:

Aggregates

↓

consisting of sensory 

stimuli are perceived 

as

↓

Wholes--------------------------

                                               ↓

                                      whose cohesive

                                        character is

                                      conceptualized

                                       as a

                                                ↓

                                            System

According to Bell, perception operates in the following way: chaotic aggregates are fed into the mind through senses and are then converted into information-bearing "wholes" by the processes of perception. The "wholes" exist in the mind as a system. That is, what converts the formless aggregate into the structured whole is the perception of "system" or "pattern".

However, linguistic perception is not totally the same as the visual perception. When the reader perceives fragments of the surface structure to grasp the coherent meaning, he does not conduct it in a stimulus-response manner. Rather, he is likely to group items around informational cluster and creatively integrate the process with rearrangement and evaluation strategies. Unlike optical perception it is not simply a matter of transferring the text from the page to the mind. The initial mental version stored in long-term memory must be subjected to a process of combining, reducing, rearranging, or deleting certain information (van Dijk, 1977). Thus what the mind really registers is not identical with the text in structure. He would supply components of the image, drawing upon experience and knowledge concerned with the real world. What's more, different workings of aesthetic faculties might produce digressed images.

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