The reality of phonological forms: a reply to Port.

ABSTRACT

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.