The Perception of Phonemes as a Function of Acoustic and Distributional Cues

Abstract

Do phonemes have any kind of existence to the extent that they can be perceived? One may well argue that phonemes are the out; come of a linguistic operation on language material and may be described in terms of their distinctive character. It is by no means certain that this distinctive character has a perceptual correlate as such in the listener. On the contrary, there is substantial evidence that in speech perception a number of perceptual cues are Operative that need not coincide with the distinctive features as postulated by __ jalcabsan and Halle 1. In fact, some phonemes can be recognized in ' ‘3“ isolation on the strength of inherent perceptual cues, such as colour ' and duration in the case of vowels. That linguistic elements belonging to the same class of phenomena, in this case phonemes, should show a certain differentiation in the degree of autonomy need cause no surprise. On the morphemic level one generally distinguishes between free and bound forms. A similar observation may be made regarding the meaning of words. _ ‘ Some linguists hold that word meanings can be established only by _Ï_ ' . ????