Nicholas Bodley wrote:

>
> The recent lively discussion centering around Suzanne McCarthy revealed
> the idea that some people don't perceive consonants and vowels separately,
> apparently in Tamil, among other scripts. If I followed the discussion
> correctly, it seems that they might generally and easily perceive
> syllables, at least in some sense and at least part of the time.

When I noticed the "monosyllabic" original origins of writing, I started
to find the (then sparse) psycholinguistic literature in this area
(references in my Milwaukee article in *The Linguistics of Literacy*;
works by Liberman et al. at Haskins, Marais et al. somewhere in
Portugal). Preliterate people generally can't do tasks involving
stretches of speech shorter than the syllable; and there's also evidence
that Indic-script-users also can't do it (that reference is I think in
my Blackwell Handbook chapter; it may come from one of the many vols.
edited by Olson).

[Hopefully tomorrow the electrician will be back to finish putting in
the phone jacks, and then the computer can be in the same room as the
books.]
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...