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Linguistics Circle Seminar - 24 April 2026

This event will be taking place on Friday 24th April 2026 at 12:00-13:00pm face-to-face in the University of Malta, Campus Hub Block O Room 204.

Title and Abstract of this Seminar: Phonemic awareness goes hand in hand with phonetic deafness

Prof. Holger Mitterer (Cognitive Science, Faculty of Media & Knowledge Sciences University of Malta).

ABSTRACT

Does learning to read merely create meta-linguistic awareness of phonemes, or does it fundamentally restructure speech processing itself? This question—already posed in the classic paper on phonemic awareness based on reading acquisition —has remained contentious. Visual word recognition research has strongly argued that literacy changes pre-lexical representations, making pre-lexical units multi-modal and activated bottom-up during spoken word recognition. Here, I challenge this view, proposing instead that phonemic awareness is a post-lexical phenomenon that may actually reduce sensitivity to phonetic reality when it lacks orthographic coding.

The empirical basis for the challenge on data on awareness for glottal stops, which have explicit graphemes in Maltese and German but also occur without orthographic coding where they mark prosodic boundaries. If literacy creates multi-modal pre-lexical units, listeners should identify glottal stops as segments even in uncoded instances, because it is the nature of pre-lexical units that are activated by bottom-up input. However, our results with over 200 German and Maltese participants show the opposite.

These findings suggest phonemic awareness is post-lexical rather than based on pre-lexical speech representations. Together with the finding that participants report the presence of deleted segments in spontaneous speech despite their phonetic absence, this suggests that literacy creates meta-linguistic knowledge while simultaneously rendering listeners 'deaf' to the phonetic reality.