1

The phoneme as a psychological reality

Anmar Ahmed

1 – Historical background

Badouin de Courtenay was the first linguist who adopted the idea of the
phoneme as a mental process . Depending on perception , Sapir (1933) was the first to
argue explicitly that the phoneme is a unit of perception, by showing how phonemic
perception could account for a variety of otherwise puzzling “errors” made by his
native consultants . He is the only linguist to have presented careful observations of
native perceptual responses relevant to this question, in his classic paper on
psychological reality (1933), and his reports are directly counter to the taxonomic
account of speech perception ( Chomsky , 1964 , P. 100 ) .

2 – The definition

The reality of phonetics and phonology comes from two main sources . The
biological mechanisms ( using muscles to bring articulatory organs into place ) . The
psychological subjects ( perceiving and discriminating speech sounds ) ( Clark &
Yallop , 2000 , P . 5 ) .

Psychological reality implies mental storage of underlying representations which

are converted into surface representations by the application of rules . Chomsky and
Halle ( 1968 , P . 14 ) , speak of ' mental construction ' by speaker and hearer and in
connection with access to underlying representation in the process of reading aloud
and with the development of such representation in children's acquisition of
language , they refer to the fundamental importance of the question of psychological
reality of linguistic constructs .
 2

3 – Phoneme

An insight into the complexity of the informational content of speech sounds is a

necessary prerequisite for the discussion of the various outer approaches to the
phoneme in its relation to sound. In the oldest of these approaches, going back to
Baudouin de Courtenay and still surviving, the phoneme is a sound imagined or
intended, opposed to the emitted sound as a 'psychophonetic' phenomenon to the
'physiophonetic' fact. It is the mental equivalent of an exteriorized sound. The unity of
the phoneme, as compared with the variety of its implementations, is seen as a
discrepancy between the internal impetus aiming at the same pronunciation and
the involuntary vacillation in the fulfillment ( Jakobson & Halle , 2002 , P 22 – 23 ) .

Since each time a speaker pronounces the sound [p] it is acoustically never quite
the same as the last [p ], the speaker must have internalized an image or idealized
picture of the sound, a target which he tries to approximate. Badouin de Courtenay
spoke of the phoneme as "a sound imagined or intended, opposed to the emitted sound
as a 'psycho phonetic' phenomenon to the 'physiophonetic' fact" .

4 - Opposition perspectives

A number of linguists from different linguistic schools present many opinions

against analyzing the phoneme as a psychological reality . The American linguist
Twaddell believed that such definitions of the phoneme is invalid because we have
no right to guess about the linguistic workings of an inaccessible ' mind ' and we can
secure no advantage from such guesses . He believed that the linguistic processes of
the mind as such are quite simply unobservable and introspection is notoriously a fire
in a wooden stove ( Hayman , 1975 , P . 72 ) .
 3

Trubetzkoy represented the reaction of Prague School against De Courtenay's

views , he stated '' Reference to psychology must be avoided in defining the
phoneme , since the latter is a linguist and not a psychological concept . '' . Any
reference to '' linguistic consciousness '' must be ignored in defining the phoneme , ''
linguistic consciousness '' being either a metaphorical designation of the system of
language or a rather vague concept , which itself must be defined and possibly cannot
even be defined ( Trubetzkoy , 1939 , P . 38 ) .

5 – Basic phonological principles

This theory depends on a number of principles in defining phonemes . It depends

on two levels of adequacy , grammatical prerequisites to phonology ,
morphophonemics , systematic phonemic and phonological abstractness .

A phonological analysis is observationally adequate if it accurately transcribes

the data and nothing more . It is descriptively adequate , if in addition to transcribing
the data , it accounts for the knowledge .Grammatical prerequisites can be
summarized as need of phonology for morphology and syntax or what was called
level mixing ( Hayman , 1975 , P . 74 – 76 ) .

Morphophonemics A branch of linguistics referring to the analysis and

classification of the phonological factors which affect the appearance of morphemes,
or, correspondingly, the grammatical factors which affect the appearance of
phonemes. In the European tradition, morphophonology (or morphonology) is the
preferred term; in the American tradition, it is morphophonemics. In some theories,
morphophonemics is seen as a separate level of linguistic structure intermediate
between grammar and phonology . In early versions of generative grammar,
morphophonemic rules were distinguished as a separate component in the derivation
of sentences, whereby a terminal string of morphemes would be converted into their
correct phonological form. In later generative theory, the term systematic phonemics
became standard ( Crystal , 2008 , P . 315 ) .
 4

The systematic phonemic is the underlying level correspond to the speaker's

storage of phonological representations . It is deeper and more abstract than a
conventional transcription and could be as abstract as the phonological rules would
allow ( Clark & Yallop , 2000 , P . 156 ) .

The phonological abstractness is the postulation of segments which are never

realized, where a language is assumed to have an underlying distinction between two
segments which are always phonetically merged ( Odden , 2005 , P. 258) .

Abstractness in phonology means that we suppose the existence of segments that

are more or less different from the surface . For example The distribution of Clear-L
and Dark-L is complementary. They are allophones, the realizations of an abstract
category, a phoneme, which we represent as /l/. Any phoneme is an abstraction
compared to the actual sounds . You cannot pronounce a phoneme : you can only
pronounce an allophone, either Clear-L or Dark-L. The phoneme is, perhaps, more
than a sound; it is the sum of its allophones ( Nadasdy , 2013 , P . 1-2 ) .
 5

References

Chomsky , N . ( 1964 ) . Current Issue in Linguistic Theory . New York : Mouton De

Gruyter .

Chomsky , N & Halle , M . ( 1968 ) . The Sound Pattern of English . New York :
Harper & Row Publishers .

Clark , J & Yallop , C . ( 2000 ) . Phonetics and Phonology . London : Blackwell

Publisher .

Crystal , D . ( 2008 ) . A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics . London : Blackwell

Hayman , L . ( 1975 ) . Phonology : Theory and Analysis . Washington DC : Library

of Congress .

Jakobson , R & Halle , M . ( 2002 ) . Fundamentals of Language . New York :

Mouton De Gruyter .

Nadasdy , A . ( 2013 ) . English Phonological Analysis . Budapest : Evtos Lorand

University .

Odden , D . ( 2005 ) . Introducing Phonology . Cambridge : Cambridge University

Press .

Trubetzkoy , N . ( 1939 ) . Principles of Phonology . California : The Center for

Research in Language and Linguistics .
5