The reality of phonological forms: a reply to Port.

I suggest four grounds on which an argument can be made that phonological language forms are not merely emergent properties of the public language use of members of a language community. They are: 1) the existence of spontaneous errors of speech production in which whole consonants or vowels misorder or are replaced; 2) the necessary existence of language "particles" used by individual language users in order for words to be able to be coined; 3) the remarkable effectiveness of alphabetic writing systems and the tight coupling among skilled readers of orthographic and phonological language forms; 4) the finding that, by late infancy, children have discovered phonological constancies despite phonetic variation.

[1]  Joseph Paul Stemberger,et al.  Speech errors in early child language production , 1989 .

[2]  Dani Byrd,et al.  Dynamic action units slip in speech production errors , 2007, Cognition.

[3]  V. Fromkin.  Speech errors as linguistic evidence , 1976 .

[4]  C. Best,et al.  Development of Phonological Constancy , 2009, Psychological science.

[5]  R Frost,et al.  Toward a strong phonological theory of visual word recognition: true issues and false trails. , 1998, Psychological bulletin.

[6]  Peter F. MacNeilage,et al.  The Production of Speech , 2011, Springer New York.

[7]  S. Goldinger.  Echoes of echoes? An episodic theory of lexical access. , 1998, Psychological review.

[8]  Michael Studdert-Kennedy,et al.  The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Evolutionary Implications of the Particulate Principle: Imitation and the Dissociation of Phonetic Form from Semantic Function , 2000 .

[9]  William L. Abler,et al.  On the particulate principle of self-diversifying systems , 1989 .

[10]  Robert F. Port,et al.  Rich memory and distributed phonology , 2010 .

[11]  G S Dell,et al.  A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. , 1986, Psychological review.

[12]  M. Studdert-Kennedy,et al.  The evolutionary emergence of language : social function and the origins of linguistic form , 2000 .

[13]  C. Browman,et al.  Articulatory Phonology: An Overview , 1992, Phonetica.

[14]  Norbert Hornstein,et al.  Chomsky and His Critics , 2003 .

[15]  Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel,et al.  Sublexical Units and Suprasegmental Structure in Speech Production Planning , 1983 .