This article argues that reading and writing development are best understood as part of an acquisitional continuum rather than as autonomous skills detached from language development. Building on models of early language acquisition and on the distinction between core grammar and periphery, the paper proposes that literacy constitutes a second cycle of acquisition, one that is instructionally mediated yet biologically constrained. In this cycle, literacy does not introduce new linguistic primitives but reengages phonological and grammatical representations established during early development, reorganizing them under conditions of explicit instruction, normativity, and negative evidence. Drawing on linguistic theory and neurocognitive accounts of learning, the article shows how literacy operates primarily in the peripheral domain of the grammatical system, refining access to phonological structure, grapheme–phoneme relations, and syntactic representations. The analysis further argues that the success of literacy instruction depends on its alignment with the organization and limits of the linguistic system it revisits, highlighting the role of processing constraints and representational reuse. By situating literacy within the broader logic of acquisition, the paper offers a principled framework for understanding reading and writing development and for bridging the traditional divide between language acquisition and literacy studies.
Marcello Marcelino (Sat,) studied this question.