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Perception and Awareness in Phonological Processing: the Case of the Phoneme

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Perception and Awareness in Phonological Processing: the Case of the Phoneme See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/222609954 Perception and awareness in phonological processing: the case of the phoneme ARTICLE in COGNITION · APRIL 1994 Impact Factor: 3.63 · DOI: 10.1016/0010-0277(94)90032-9 CITATIONS DOWNLOADS VIEWS 67 45 94 2 AUTHORS: José Morais Regine Kolinsky Université Libre de Bruxelles Université Libre de Bruxelles 92 PUBLICATIONS 1,938 CITATIONS 103 PUBLICATIONS 1,571 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE Available from: Regine Kolinsky Retrieved on: 15 July 2015 Cognition, 50 (1994) 287-297 OOlO-0277/94/$07.00 0 1994 - Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Perception and awareness in phonological processing: the case of the phoneme JosC Morais*, RCgine Kolinsky Laboratoire de Psychologie exptrimentale, Universitt Libre de Bruxelles, Av. Ad. Buy1 117, B-l 050 Bruxelles, Belgium Abstract The necessity of a “levels-of-processing” approach in the study of mental repre- sentations is illustrated by the work on the psychological reality of the phoneme. On the basis of both experimental studies of human behavior and functional imaging data, it is argued that there are unconscious representations of phonemes in addition to conscious ones. These two sets of mental representations are func- tionally distinct: the former intervene in speech perception and (presumably) production; the latter are developed in the context of learning alphabetic literacy for both reading and writing purposes. Moreover, among phonological units and properties, phonemes may be the only ones to present a neural dissociation at the macro-anatomic level. Finally, it is argued that even if the representations used in speech perception and those used in assembling and in conscious operations are distinct, they may entertain dependency relations. Cognitive psychology is concerned with what information is represented mentally and how it is represented. In these twenty years or so of Cognition’s life the issue of where, that is, at what levels of processing, particular types of information are represented has become increasingly compelling. This issue is crucial both to track the mental itinerary of information and to draw a correct *Corresponding author. Fax 32 2 6502209, e-mail [email protected] The authors’ work discussed in the present paper was supported by the Human Frontier Science Program (project entitled Processing consequences of contrasting language phonologies) as well as the Belgian Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) - Loterie Nationale (convention nos. 8.4527.90 and 8.4505.93) and the Belgian Minis&e de I’Education de la Communaute francaise (“Action de Recherche concertee” entitled Le traitement du langage darts diffkrentes modalitts: approches comparatives). The second author is Research Associate of the Belgian FNRS. Special thanks are due to all our collaborators, and in particular to Mireille Cluytens. SSDI OOlO-0277(93)00601-3 picture of mental structure. However, the “where” question may be even more difficult to answer than the “what” and “how” ones. In spite of the tremendous development of the functional imaging technology. we arc still unable to follow on a computer screen the multiple recodings of information accomplished in the brain. Thus. the experimental study of human behavior remains up to now the most powerful approach to the mind’s microstructure. Sadly, we all know that what we register are intentional responses given under the request of the experimenter, so that the evidence arising from an experiment may be difficult to attribute to a particular stage of processing. No reader of Cognition doubts that he or she can represent phonemes mentally. Characters coming out of press or from the writer’s hand are costumed phonemes, or at least may be described as such. But at how many processing level(s) and how deeply do phonemes live in our minds‘? We take the phoneme issue as a good illustration both of the necessity of pursuing a “levels-of- processing” inquiry in the study of mental representations and of the misunder- standings and pitfalls this difficult study may be confronted with. In the seventh volume of this journal, our group demonstrated (at least we believe so) that the notion that speech can be represented as a sequence of phonemes does not arise as a natural consequence of cognitive maturation and informal linguistic cxpcrience (Morais, Cary, Alegria, & Bertelson, 1979). This claim was based on the discovery that illiterate adults are unable to manipulate phonemes intentionally, as evidenced by their inability to delctc “p” from “purse” or add “p” to “urso”. In a subsequent volume of this journal, under the guest editorship of Paul Bertelson. it was reported that Chinese non-alphabetic readers share with illiterates the lack of phonemic awareness (Read, Zhang, Nie, 81 Ding, 1986) and that the metaphonological failure of illiterates seems to be restricted to the phoneme. since they can both manipulate syllables and ap- preciate rhyme (Morais. Bertelson. Cary. & Alegria, 1986). Later on, we observed that illiterates can compare short utterances for phonological length (Kolinsky, Cary, & Morais, 1987), which again suggests that conscious access to global phonological properties of speech utterances does not depend on literacy. We were happy that Cognition’s reviewers had understood the interest of our 1979 paper. As a matter of fact, we had submitted a former version of it to another journal, which rejected it on the basis of the comments of one reviewer who could not believe in our results given that, as Peter Eimas and others had shown (e.g., Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vigorito, 1971), American babies can perceive “phonemic” distinctions, like between “ba”, “da” and “ga”, fairly well. We are not complaining about reviewers- almost every paper of the present authors has greatly improved following reviewers’ criticisms - sincerely, we are almost grateful to the anonymous reviewer and presumably distinguished scholar who confounded perception and awareness. It was probably his or her reviewing that led us both to write: “the fact that illiterates are not aware of the phonetic .I. Morais, R. Kolinsky I Cognition 50 (1994) 2X7-297 289 structure of speech does not imply, of course, that they do not use segmenting routines at this level when they listen to speech” (Morais et al., 1979, p. 330), and to conclude the paper stressing the need “to distinguish between the prevalence of such or such a unit in segmenting routines at an unconscious level and the ease of access to the same units at a conscious, metalinguistic level” (p. 331). In the following years, we progressively realized that, as far as our own work was concerned, the battle to distinguish between perceptual and postperceptual representations had just begun. The work with illiterates and with non-alphabetic readers has contributed to nourish, if not to raise, the suspicion that the phoneme could be, after all, and despite our familiarity with it, a simple product of knowing an alphabet. Warren (1983) rightly called one’s attention to the danger of introspection in this domain: “Our exposure to alphabetic writing since early childhood may encourage U S t o accept the analysis of speech into a sequence of sounds as simply the recognition of a fact of nature” (p. 287). However, he has erroneously taken observations from the conscious awareness level as evidence of perceptual reality or non- reality. In the same paper, he listed the “experimental evidence that phonemes are not perceptual units” (our italics). In this list, the fact that “illiterate adults cannot segment phonetically” (p. 289) appears at the top. Some linguists have reached the same conclusion as far as the role of phonemes in the formal description of phonology is concerned. Kaye (1989), for instance, announces “the death of the phoneme” (head of a section, p. 149), in the context of an attempt to demonstrate that “a phonology based on non-linear, multileveled representations is incompatible with the notion of a phoneme” (pp. 153-154). Is the phoneme dead? Did it ever exist otherwise than in the conscious thoughts of alphabetically literate minds ? Are phonemes the make-up of letters rather than letters the make-up of phonemes? Like Orfeo, we have to face the illusions that constantly assault the visitors of perception. One may use perceptual illusions to fight against experimenters’ illusions. Fodor and Pylyshyn (1981) have convincingly argued for “the centrality, in perceptual psychology, of experiments which turn on the creation of perceptual illusions” (p. 161). Besides its ability to demonstrate the direction of causality between two correlated states, the production of an illusion implies that the perceiver has no full conscious control of the informational content of the illusion. Thus, information that is not consciously represented may, if it is represented at an unconscious perceptual level, influence the misperception. By looking at the informational content of the illusion, and having enough reasons to believe that part of this information cannot come from conscious representations, one is allowed to locate the representation of that part of the information at the unconscious perceptual system. Following the logic of illusory conjunctions (cf. Treisman & Schmidt, 1982), we took advantage of the dichotic listening technique to elicit word illusions which 290 J. Morais, R. Kolinsky I C’ognition 50 (I 094) X7-297 should result from the erroneous combination of parts of information presented to one ear with parts of information presented to the opposite ear (see Kolinsky, 1992, and Kolinsky, Morais. & Cluytens. in press, for detailed description of the methodology). If speech attributes can be wrongly combined, they must have been separately registered as independent units at some earlier stage of process- ing. In our situation. since the subject is asked either to detect a word target previously specified or to identify the word presented in one particular ear, his or her attention is not called upon any word constituent.
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