Re: CHAT: Parallelism

On Sun, 13 Jun 1999, Nik Taylor wrote:

> Tom Wier wrote:
> > I think all it shows is that the concept of a phoneme is just an idealization,
> > but a necessary and useful one
>
> That's something like what I think.  I do believe that something like
> the phoneme is stored in the brain, and that the brain, *when producing
> speech* uses those phonemes, but, of course, in production they are
> smeared, and *when hearing speach*, the brain deduces the phonemes from
> that "smeared" sound.  I don't think that words are stored in the brain
> as "holistic" unit, but rather as a serious of phonemes.
I admit to being ignorant about linguistics, but I'm not a completely
moron about psychology, and I'm fairly certain that studies have shown
that we process information better in clusters -- for instance, we
remember a phone number like 666-1369 better than, say, 238-9820.