In the realm of reading, scholars have pointed out that the reader is not so much decoding text into language, as recoding text into meaning. Decoding symbols of print into their equivalent symbols of language is part of the process, but it is far from the whole story. If all that readers did was to decode, then there would be no place for meaning in the reading process. Sender embeds meaning into language. Sender encodes language into print or another code.
Audience decodes the symbols back into language.
Audience interprets language through its own experience system into a form of meaning. Response theory in literary criticism states that each reader takes the text of the author and reconstructs that text into a set of meanings that are unique. The notion that a correct interpretation resides somewhere within each text, and that it can be found by those with the proper expertise and training is rejected in this theory in favour of a recognition that we all perceive everything in the world through the filter of our own experience. This filter is the sum total of our life experience which we bring to every new situation. Without it, readers are not able to make meaning out of text.