Contents › Section 1: Phonetics, phonology and orthography › answer 11 of 32
Is the very concept of the phoneme disputed?
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The one point that doesn't seem to have been mentioned is the distinction between segmental and non-segmental approaches to phonology going back at least to the 1960s. So while something phoneme-like may indeed be useful for some kinds of linguistic analysis, the psychological reality (as pointed out) or practical utility (for speech recognition, for instance), has long been in question.
Approaches such as autosegmental phonology or exemplar phonology all seem to be dancing around the same issue of phoneme being at the same time so attractive and so limiting as an analytic concept.
© Dominik Lukeš. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Originally published on Linguistics Stack Exchange, attributed there to Dominik Lukes (profile).