Phonological Abilities in Fully Illiterate Adults

Does learning to read change the perception of speech? Evidence from perceptual recalibration of speech sounds in adult illiterates, semi-literates, and literates of Tamil

“…Importantly, for the purpose of our study we found that completely illiterate participants performed as well as literate participants in the perceptual learning task. The performance of the illiterates in the perceptual learning task is particularly exceptional given that illiterate participants perform less well on almost any cognitive task that is administered to them (Morais & Kolinsky, 2019;Huettig & Mishra, 2014), including the working memory and Raven's tasks administered in the present study. In short, despite low scores in working memory and non-verbal intelligence we observed remarkable perceptual learning capabilities in our illiterate participants.…”

“…There is however also evidence that appears to be (at least) inconsistent with the notion that learning to read results in the restructuring of lexical representations. Investigations employing lowlevel perception tasks (e.g., categorical perception or phonetic fusion in dichotic listening), for instance, mostly did not find clear differences between literate and illiterate adults (for a review, see Morais & Kolinsky, 2019). Kolinsky and colleagues for example argue that reading acquisition does not change categorical perception of speech sounds, though they propose that literacy exerts its influence on categorical precision.…”

“…First, it is important to realize that phonological restructuring would result in similar grain sizes of pre-lexical representations in the visual and auditory domain. Morais and Kolinsky (2019) have correctly pointed out in this regard how problematic the assumption is (often made by reading instructors) that letters stand for speech sounds. Indeed, there is a consensus among researchers that any relation is far more complex.…”

Neural Activation during Phonological Processing in Primary-School Children with Limited Reading Experience: Insights from Rural Côte d’Ivoire

“…The reciprocal relation between PA and reading suggests that individuals who lack reading experience have poorer PA. Indeed, illiterate adults show poorer PA relative to their literate peers, in part, because of a lack of reciprocal influence of reading on PA (Bowey, 1994;Eme, 2011;Morais & Kolinsky, 2019). A series of studies by Morais et al (1987;1986;1979) showed that illiterate adults perform poorly on a phoneme deletion PA task, despite showing relatively good performance on syllable and word level PA tasks.…”