The phoneme: A conceptual heritage from alphabetic literacy

In contemporaneous cognitive psychology and cognitive science, literacy is not a central concept. In this paper, on the contrary, it is argued that both cognition and cognitive science are deeply influenced by literacy. Before addressing the experimental work on the structure of speech and spoken language, one of the major themes of Jacques Mehler's work, I recall his links with the Brussels Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and the important influence he had on the discipline and on our work. Most of the present paper is a discussion of the concept of the phoneme, its dependence on literacy, its role in language, and of the constant interactions between orthography and phonology in spoken language recognition. I argue that the phoneme is not a unit of perception, but a literate cognitive concept. In this way, I hope that cognitive science will overtly recognize the literacy heritage, the building of which it greatly contributes to.