Date: Wed, 13 Sep 1995 17:31:04 CDT
From: "Donald M. Lance" ENGDL[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MIZZOU1.MISSOURI.EDU
Subject: Re: Pronounciation of Oxymoron -Reply
Sali:
No, my position has not changed. All of the "real" that we have _conscious_
access to is a product of some sort of construct-building, because thinking
is construct-building. When we produce syllables (e.g., in the string
'nu-cu-lar' or the string 'nu-klee-ar') we are using "physically real"
neurons and muscles without "thinking" about how or where precisely to
place peaks and valleys in the amount of muscular energy applied to the
speech mechanisms. What I was doing was playing around the dichotomy
between "physical reality" and "mental reality." You're absolutely on
target in your comments about degrees or "remoteness" in abstractions.
The article on the psychological reality of the phoneme was written by
Sapir, in French; I haven't looked at it in years, but my recollection
is that he was attempting to deal with what we do _un_consciously as we
differentiate between phonemes. Recent work with infant perception of
speech tries to get at that phenomenon by pairing a "high" vowel (/i/ or
/e/) with a low vowel (/a/ or /o/) [second formant having high versus
low frequency]. When the infant looks at the light when it hears /i/
and looks at the ball when it hears /a/, it is not engaging in the
kind of abstraction that we adults do when we differentiate between /nit/
and /nat/, but both the infant and the adult respond to something
"physically real" in the vowel sound uttered. The adult can assign the
sound to a phoneme class but the infant can't. And go from one idiolect
to another and adults might mis-hear "not" as "naught" because of the
different "hard-wired" phonological systems in the two idiolects. DMLance