ABSTRACT
Twenty years ago, while spending a year in the United States as a Ful-bright lecturer in linguistics, I presented a paper to the Chicago Linguistic Society entitled “Writing Systems and Phonological Insights,” dealing with the impact of writing on native perception of linguistic units and on the direction of linguistic research and speculation (Bugarski, 1970). In retrospect, this paper appears to have foreshadowed, from a linguistic angle, some of the major notions and preoccupations associated with the interdisciplinary focus on writing and literacy that has developed over the last 2 decades. Robert Scholes recently singled it out as an extremely rare specimen of its kind (Scholes, 1989; Scholes & Willis, 1990).
