A component of information theory consisting of interpretation of the symbols of communication.
The process of extracting meaning from symbols, such as written, spoken, or signed words or numbers. An important intellectual skill, basic to much learning, decoding poses significant problems for many people with brain dysfunction. A child with learning disabilities, especially dyslexia, for example, may see printed words upside down, backward, or distorted in a variety of ways, and so may have trouble decoding the symbols. Similarly, a child with dyscalculia may have trouble decoding and working with mathematical symbols. Such children may also have trouble with the reverse process, encoding. Various tests are used to try to identify decoding problems so that teachers and therapists can help the child learn to overcome them.
The process of translating a code (usually a number) back into the term which the code represents. With many coding systems used in health care, which are really category coding systems, the original term is not retrievable because the categories of the classification are designed to hold groups of similar things. For example, in category coding, hospitals are coded as to “church” or some other “control.” When all one knows about a hospital is this code, all that can be retrieved about a given church hospital by decoding is the fact that it is a church hospital; whether the church is Catholic or Methodist cannot be determined by decoding from the category coding.