Unveiling my literate glasses

In Régine Kolinsky and José Morais excellent opinion paper they alert us for the perils of not being aware that we “wear literate glasses” which leads to biased views of language and cognition. In this comment, I discuss how my literate glasses were unveiled through the help and guidance of Régine and José. In the first part of the comment I describe several works showing the linking between phonology and orthography with orthography shaping how we process spoken language at different levels/processes both in adults and in children. In the second part of this comment, I evaluate general effects of literacy by comparing adult illiterates, ex-illiterates, and literates, showing that fine-grained, phoneme-sized, lexical representations exist in illiterates, although these underlying phonemic representations that ultimately arise in the mental lexicon do usually not reach a conscious level - phoneme awareness only emerges from learning to read in an alphabetic system.