The psychological reality of phonemes (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Status of the Concept of ‘Phoneme’ in Psycholinguistics
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2010
The notion of the phoneme counts as a break-through of modern theoretical linguistics in the early twentieth century. It paved the way for descriptions of distinctive features at different levels in linguistics. Although it has since then had a turbulent existence across altering theoretical positions, it remains a powerful concept of a fundamental unit in spoken language. At the same time, its conceptual status remains highly unclear. The present article aims to clarify the status of the concept of 'phoneme' in psycholinguistics, based on the scientific concepts of description, understanding and explanation. Theoretical linguistics has provided mainly descriptions. The ideas underlying this article are, first, that these descriptions may not be directly relevant to psycholinguistics and, second, that psycholinguistics in this sense is not a sub-discipline of theoretical linguistics. Rather, these two disciplines operate with different sets of features and with different orientations when it comes to the scientific concepts of description, understanding and explanation.
The nonperceptual reality of the phoneme
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior
Subjects responded as soon as they heard a preset target in a sequence of nonsense syllables. The target was a complete syllable (e.g., "baeb" "saeb") or a phoneme from that syllable, the syllable-initial consonant phoneme for some objects (e.g., "b-" or "s-"), and the medial vowel phoneme for other subjects (e.g., "-ae-"). Subjects responded more slowly to phoneme targets than to syllable targets (by 40 msec for/s-/, 70 msec for/b-/and 250 msec for medial /ae/). These results indicate that phoneme identification is subsequent to the perception of larger phonological units. The reality of the phoneme is demonstrated independently of speech perception and production by the natural presence of alphabets, rhymes, spoonerisms, and interphonemic contextual constraints.
A view of phonology from a cognitive and functional perspective 1
While morphosyntax and semantics have been studied from afunctional and cognitive perspective, much less emphasis has been placed on phonological phenomena in these frameworks. This paper proposes a rethinking of phonology , arguing that (i) the lexical representation of words have phonetic substance that is gradually changed by phonetic processes; (ii) the spread of these phonetic changes is at least partly accounted for by the way particular items are used in discourse; (iii) the study of exceptions, marginal phenomena , and subphonemic detail are important to the understanding of how phonological information is stored and processed; (iv) generalizations at the morphological and lexical level have radically different properties than generalizations at the phonetic level, with the former having a cognitive or semantic motivation, while the latter have a motor or physical motivation; and (v) that the best way to model the interaction of generalizations with the lexicon is not by separating rules from lists of items, but rather by conceiving of generalizations as patterns or schemas that emerge from the organization of stored lexical units.
Phoneme in Functional and Structural Phonology
2009
The aim of this paper is to examine, as far as the space permits, various definitions of a linguistic concept known as the phoneme. During the course of time there have appeared several definitions of this concept. As there have been many linguistic schools, virtually every one of them has put forth its own definition of the phoneme. It is not, however, the goal of this paper to examine all of the definitions of the phoneme (it would be a rather long treatment). The purpose of this work is to concentrate on one particular stream of thinking: Functional and Structural phonology. While, as will be shown below, certain definitions of the phoneme are mutually incompatible and represent different approaches, we can register a gradual and self-improving development of the concept of the phoneme within the scope of the phonological theory of Functional and Structural phonology. The present paper will attempt to map, though not exhaustively, the development and provide comments on various d...
Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1986
Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1986), pp. 212-223