| Abstract | Studies of speech and writing face a paradox: the discrete units of the written representation of an utterance cannot be isolated in its quasi-continuous articulatory and acoustic structure. We may resolve the paradox by positing that units of writing (ideographs, syllabic signs, alphabetic letters) are symbols for discrete, percetuomotor, neural control structures, normally engaged in speaking and listening. Focussing on the phoneme, for which an alphabetic letter is a symbol, the paper traces its emergence in a child’s speech through several stages: hemispheric specialization for speech preception at birth, early discriminative capacity followed by gradual loss of the capacity to discriminate among speech sounds not used in the surrounding language, babbling, and first words. The word, a unit of meaning that mediates the child’s entry into language, is viewed as an articulatory routine, a sequence of a few variable gestures of lips, jaw, tongue, velum and larynx, and their acoustic correlates. Under pressure from an increasing vocabulary, recurrent patterns of sound and gesture crystallize into encapsulated phonemic control units. Once a full repertoire of phonemes has emerged, usually around the middle of the third year, an explosive growth of vocabulary begins, and the child is soon ready, a least in principle, for the metalinguistic task of learning to read. |
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