We will present several studies ran on adults with varying degrees of literacy (from unschooled illiterate adults to schooled literates) and discuss whether literacy acquisition modifies categorical perception and the precision of phonemic categories as well as the involvement of phonemes and/or phonetic features in word recognition. Implications for or from other cognitive domains (e.g., working memory) will also be considered.

Bio

Régine Kolinsky is Doctor in Psychology, Research Director of the National Fund for Scientific Research, Belgium, and Head of the Research Unit in Cognitive Neurosciences at Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her main research themes are the cognitive and brain consequences of literacy and schooling, and the interactions between language and music. She published 5 books and about 200 articles and chapters of books, some in prestigious Journals like Science, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Brain, Journal of Experimental Psychology, and Cognition.