The present research intends to build a specific semiotics, able to shed light on the learning processes of reading and writing during the developmental age. Several disciplines inform this field of research: whereas psychology and neuroscience consider reading and writing skills as a cognitive state reached by the human being in the course of his/her individual development, cognitive archeology and linguistics consider the same phenomenon from a cultural phylogeny perspective. These very disciplines can be divided into two categories, depending on whether they adopt an internalist perspective — where reading and writing are assessed as activities performed by the brain and the neurons — or a distributive one — which studies the evolution and the adoption of written language’s material form.
Interpretative and cognitive semiotics allow to mediate and translate between these different perspectives, illustrating how learning a socially regulated practice built upon available material forms can produce deep modifications at a neurophysiological level, within the constraints of a cerebral architecture which — albeit plastic — imposes its rules and forced paths.
The present study suggests that sign production and abductive inference have a central role in the learning processes, as well as in the process of acquiring the fundamental skills of emergent literacy (the discovery of the phoneme and phonemic awareness) and, as a result, in the recycling and exaptation functions that take place at a neurophysiological level.