The Illusion of the Phoneme

A caveat is warranted here. While our title is provocative, our ambitions are much more prosaic. Obviously the debate on the ontological status of the phoneme has a long and complicated history. We offer neither a summary of this debate nor a last word on the question. We seek only to question the role of the phoneme in the perception of speech and, in doing so, we hope to demonstrate that the empirical evidence for the causal role of the phoneme in perception is limited.