Words, symbols and rich memory

A series of arguments is presented showing that words are not stored in memory in a way that resembles the abstract, phonological code used by orthography or by linguistic analysis. Words are stored in a very concrete, detailed code that includes nonlinguistic information including speaker’s voice properties and other auditory details. Thus, memory for language resembles an exemplar memory and abstract descriptions (using letter-like units and speaker-invariant features) are probably computed on the fly whenever needed. One consequence of this hypothesis is that the study of phonology should be the study of generalizations across the speech of a community and that such a description will employ units (segments, syllable types, prosodic patterns, etc.) that are not, themselves, employed as units in speakers’ memory for language. That is, the psychological units of language are not useful for description of linguistic generalizations and the study of linguistic generalizations are not useful for storing the language for speaker use.