Conquer primal fear: Phonological features are innate and substance-free

Abstract We argue that the representational primes of human phonological faculty, so-called distinctive features, are innate and substance-free. Our arguments for innateness features built on traditional novel logical arguments, experimental evidence accumulating over recent decades, somewhat detailed proposals about their neurobiological reality. As symbols in brain, substance-free, is, they devoid articulatory acoustic content, or even any direct reference to such phenomena. This is consistent with our substance-free conception computation, an approach eschews functionalist notions like markedness, ease articulation, so on. also outline a neural model phonetics-phonology interface called Cognitive Phonetics, which transduces speech articulation from acoustics. These extra-grammatical transduction procedures part biological endowment, leaves no room language-specific phonetics theory externalization language. show how Phonetics can account traditionally recognized intersegmental coarticulation, as well previously unexplored intrasegmental strongly suggesting basic units production transduced features.