Reading and the phonetic module

1. Reading and the phonetic module Carol A. Fowler Haskins LaboratoriesUniversity of Connecticut Yale University

2. Perception of the speech code, 1967 • Speech is coarticulated • The consequence is extreme context-sensitivity of the acoustic signal and the absence of phone-sized segments in the signal • Coarticulation is a special behavior--special to discrete actions implemented in overlapping time frames

3. Perception of the speech code, 1967 • Perception tracks articulation more transparently than it tracks the acoustic signal • Listeners recruit their speech motor systems to recover consonants and vowels from acoustic products of coarticulated speech

5. The motor theory of speech perception revised, 1985 • New to the theory (among other things): speech is produced and perceived by a phonetic module • Modules are domain specific • Processing is fast, mandatory • They are encapuslated • They are cognitively impenetrable

6. What does this have to do with reading? • It helps to explain why learning to read can be difficult • It raises the question, though, why reading is even possible

7. Why learning to read can be hard • The module derives consonants and vowels • It is cognitively impenetrable • To appreciate the alphabetic principle, children need phonemic awareness • The phonetic module makes achieving awareness difficult

8. But why is reading even possible • It is not just possible, it can get so easy that people read for pleasure! • The phonetic module provides the inputs to higher levels of linguistic processing • Evolution cannot have prepared it for orthographic inputs

9. Is reading purely visual? • That would mean not taking advantage of the human’s biological adaptation for language • It would mean that children could not take advantage of the fact that they already know the language they are learning to read • Anyway the data disconfirm that idea

10. The data • Within ms of seeing a printed word, readers of all tested writing systems access the pronounced forms of words

11. What do the data mean? • Readers do make use of their spoken language capability and knowledge • IGM’s special interest in 1990: They are coming up with phonetic module outputs when print cannot be an input to the module. However do they do that?

12. A conclusion • reading is possible, because it is possible for readers to come up with acceptable inputs to their spoken language system outside the module.

13. But why should that be possible? • Evolution could not have anticipated the development of writing systems • There must be independent reasons for supposing that phonological language forms can be represented “centrally” (extra-modularly, and so not cognitively impenetrably)

14. IGM’s independent reasons • Rehearsal--cognitive access is essential • Dialect information is lost in what is passed on from the module. But we are aware of dialect differences and they guide our social actions and attitudes • So the module must provide phonetic representations to central systems

15. The final move • Rehearsal tells us that language users can allow the output of the phonetic module to be its input • So another kind of input that the module can accept is phonetic or phonological

16. So how does reading work? • In central systems, ultimately highly automatized processes generate phonological forms from print • These serve as input to the phonetic module • That is where reading first makes contact with our capabilties and knowledge of the spoken language.