Rich memory and distributed phonology

Abstract

It is claimed here that experimental evidence about human speech processing and the richness of memory for linguistic material supports a distributed view of language where every speaker creates an idiosyncratic perspective on the linguistic conventions of the community. In such a system, words are not spelled in memory of speakers from uniform letter-like units (whether phones or phonemes), but rather from the rich auditory patterns of speech plus any coupled visual, somatosensory and motor patterns. The evidence is strong that people actually employ high-dimensional, spectro-temporal, auditory patterns to support speech production, speech perception and linguistic memory in real time. Abstract phonology (with its phonemes, distinctive features, syllable types, etc.) is actually a kind of social institution – a loose inventory of patterns that evolves over historical time in each human community as a structure with many symmetries and regularities in the community corpus. Linguistics studies 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 any individual speaker’s mind, much less in every mind in the community. The alphabet is actually a technology that has imposed itself on our understanding of language.