Phonological cognisance and allied linguistic representations: acquisition, bilingualism, change and script

ongoing

"PAAL's objective is to investigate the interaction of phonological representations with cognisance, and their relationship to script. We view cognisance as part of the native speaker's core knowledge of their language.This includes generalisations about constraints on phonological representations in terms of features, size and shapes of morphemes, tone and metrical structures. Cognisance is not identical to the phonological representation of particular lexical items; rather, cognisance is the knowledge about what might be a conceivable word in a given language. We argue that cognisance is involved in all levels of language processing and change, in both spoken and written modalities. Speakers may have different vocabularies, but the phonological cognisance of individuals within a speech community should converge. It has been widely claimed that the notion of ""phonological awareness"" supports script acquisition. We propose that ""phonological awareness"" has to make sense in terms of cognisance, which is fundamental to all native speakers, regardless of their level of literacy. Novel to our approach is that it makes explicit predictions about the relationship between cognisance and representation and their relationship to script. Most scripts encode aspects of phonological structure but vary across languages and change over time. Even the closely related Germanic languages we primarily investigate, all using Latinate script, differ in their relationship between phonology and script. We compare the Latinate script to Bengali (also an Indo-European language) whose writing system is very different. Our working hypothesis is that phonological cognisance and representation govern spoken and written language processing, language acquisition, and change of all languages. In this interdisciplinary project, we combine expertise and methodologies across the fields of theoretical phonology, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistics, language acquisition, and language change."