The phoneme in cognitive phonology: episodic memories of both meaningful and meaningless units?

Abstract

Cognitive linguistics assumes that languages are symbolic systems that emerge through frequent usage. If we accept the fundamentally symbolic nature of language, the question arises as to whether, in addition to the meaningful units, speakers would form separate memory structures of the meaningless ones as well. For example, would the speech sounds be stored independently of the lexical entries? In the framework of exemplar theory, there are at least two different points of view as to what the basic unit of representation in exemplar-based phonologies is. For one, it is the speech sounds and for the other it is the words. Psycholinguistic studies lend support to episodic memories of words, and neuroscience evidence, also concurring with exemplar-based approaches, suggests that the phonological aspects of the mental lexicon are primarily auditory. In this paper I argue that there are exemplar memories of meaningful units only, and that forming and storing separate exemplar clouds of speech sounds per se is not only unmotivated but problematic as well.