INVITED SPEAKERS

Scripts, Layout and Segmental Awareness

Richard Sproat

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

If one asks literate English speakers to delete the first sound of "cat", they will readily produce "at". language games involving such minimal pairs have been used to demonstrate that speakers are consciously aware of segments. But it has also been argued that segmental awareness is an epiphenomenon of the alphabet. This view was most forcefully argued by Faber (1992), who suggested that only scripts that explicitly represent both consonants and vowels in a linear fashion engender segmental awareness.

I will argue that this view is wrong. To the extent that segmental awareness is related to the script in which one's language is written, the critical issue is not linearity but the complexity of the edit operations required to convert between minimal pairs. I support this argument with data from readers of Indian scripts.