Phonemic representation exists exclusively at the underlying level
the verdict
REFUTED
the evidence says no
refutedsupported
the weight of evidence
0 sources for · 2 against
Linguistic literature and reference texts discuss surface phonemic representations alongside underlying forms, demonstrating that phonemic representation does not exist exclusively at the underlying level.
It is typically assumed that when orthography is translated silently into phonology (i.e., when reading silently), the phonological representation is equivalent to the spoken form or, at least, the surface phonemic form. The research presented here demonstrates that the phonological representation is likely to be more abstract than this, and is orthographically influenced. For example, the claim is made that the word "corn" has an underlying /r/ in its phonological representation, even in non-rhotic dialects. The evidence comes from difficulties observed in judgements about the homophony with
The shortening of linguistic expressions naturally involves some sort of correspondence between short forms and (some portion of) the respective full forms. Based mostly on data from English and Hebrew this article explores the hypothesis that such correspondence concerns necessary sameness of symbolic form, referring either to graphemic or to a specific level of phonological representation. That level indicates a degree of abstractness defined by language-specific contrastiveness (i.e. “phonemic”). Reference to written form can be shown to be highly systematic in certain contexts, including c
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