The encoding of words and their meaning is known as semantic encoding. It was first demonstrated by William Bousfield (1935) in an experiment in which he asked people to memorize words.
Memory involves three main processes: encoding (the process by which information is put into memory), storage (the process by which information is maintained in memory), and retrieval (the process by which information is recovered from memory). Encoding may be visual, acoustic, or semantic.
There are three main areas of encoding memory that make the journey possible: visual encoding, acoustic encoding and semantic encoding. It is interesting to know that tactile encoding, or learning by touch, also exists but is not always applicable.
