No role for phonology in speech processing: Taking a strong position

Abstract

It will be claimed here that experimental evidence about human speech processing and memory for linguistic material shows that words are not spelled in memory from letter-like units, whether phones or phonemes. Linguists, like others with a Western education and lifetime literacy, identify any speech quite reflexively as a sequence of letter-sized units. Consonants and vowels seem like directly observable units of language but they are not. The language data that are available to learners are the rich auditory patterns of speech plus visual, somatosensory and motor patterns. The evidence is strong that people actually employ high-dimensional, spectro-temporal, auditory patterns to support speech production, perception and memory in real time. Abstract phonology (with its phonemes, distinctive features, syllable types, etc.) needs to be reconceived as a social institution - an inventory of patterns that evolves over historical time in some community as a structure of symmetries and regularities in the community's speech corpus Linguistics should study (and actually is studying) the phonological (and grammatical) patterns of various communities of speakers. But linguists should not expect to find the descriptions they make to be explicitly represented in the content of individual speakers' minds. © 2009 Acoustical Society of America.