Phonemes and the Construction of Reality

Originally published here on March 4, 2008.

Before they have words in their heads, before the speech of others has semantic content for them, toddlers begin to parse up the sounds they hear and create categories in their minds. We call those cognitive categories phonemes.

Phonemes are one of the clearest examples of how we take the world around us and building chunks of meaning for ourselves. Call that "reality" if you want. It is, in a sense. It's our reality, at least. I'd rather say we build our own meaning to attach to reality, but whatever. Same thing...

One of the easiest ways to explain how we class sounds (vibrations of the air that have physical properties and can be measured with a machine) into phonemes is to look at the phoneme we usually call "L."



"L" is not a sound, it's an idea - an idea about how to group all the sounds together that you call “L” – different sounds that together make up “L” in your mind.

I know what you're probably thinking: “What do you mean? L is L.” And I have to say, “Not really.”

I explained it somewhere else like this:

Think about it for a moment. When you say “like,” you take the tip of your tongue and press it fairly hard against the back of your two top front teeth and you spread your tongue out like it was a hammock inside your mouth. When you say “full,” your tongue may not touch your front teeth at all; instead of spreading it out, you bunch it up in a ball in the back of your mouth and maybe the tip of it rests gently on the bony ridge you have behind your top teeth. You make a different sound at the beginning of “like” than at the end of “pull,” but you call both of them “L” if you speak English, because English speakers group them together as one phoneme.

Doesn’t everybody do that? No. In Russian those two sounds each get their own letter. You can put the “L” in “pull” at the beginning of Russian words and the “L” in “like” at the end of Russian words.

That's how it works. You group sounds together and (eventually) give them a name.

A couple of thoughts...

First, don't we all build the same reality? An "L" for you is an "L" for me, right? So how is that Constructivist? Well the answer to that is that we pretty much all build the same reality here, in our little piece of Appalachia. But if we were Russian (or Japanese or Korean), the reality we'd build would most likely be different from Appalachian reality. The fact that, as a group our different "realities" look a lot alike lends weight to the ideas of Lev Vygotsky and the Social Constructivists. They thought that constructing reality was a social activity.

Second, if you're dyslexic you probably have problems with phonemic awareness. You might build the phonemes in your head just like the next kid (which is why you can talk and understand people), but you have problems recognizing them as such. And that means that the next layer of your reality (which has to do with reading) is a little different from the reality of the other kids around you...