Literacy and awareness of the units of speech

Implications for Research on the Units of Perception

Bibliographic Data

ID3987219
AuthorsJosé Morais (0000-0002-7924-5902, corresponding author)
Year1985
Volume23
Issue5
Publication date1985-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLinguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0024-3949 • E-ISSN: 1613-396X
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/ling.1985.23.5.707
OpenAlexW2008364945
LanguageEN
Citations received5

The notion of phonetic awareness is discussed. Experiments with preliterate children, illiterate adults, and nonalphabetic literates are reviewed, which show that literacy in an alphabetic system evokes phonetic awareness. It is suggested that literacy also contributes, though to a smaller extent, to the development of explicit segmentation of utterances into syllables. The assumption implicit in many studies that order of conscious recovery reflects order of unconscious processing is rejected for both theoretical and empirical reasons. In particular, results obtained with illiterate adults suggest that data from monitoring experiments may be better interpreted in terms of conditions of conscious recovery than in terms of processing order or comprehension strategies. Finally, the question of whether or not phones play some role in perception is addressed. Fast learning in tasks of phonetic analysis and complete generalization from phones on which subjects were trained to phones on which they were not trained suggest that, during learning, subjects find access to some tacit knowledge of phones. © 1985, Mouton Publishers

Linguistics · Literacy · Pedagogy · Perception · Sociology · Speech perception · Philosophy · Psychology · Subtitles and Audiovisual Media

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