In this talk I will describe the Enhanced Literate Mind (ELM) hypothesis. As individuals learn to read and write, they are, from then on, exposed to extensive written-language input and become literate. I propose that literacy acquisition leads to, both, increased language knowledge as well as enhanced language and non-language perceptual and cognitive skills. The ELM hypothesis connects with the notion that all neurotypical (native) language users (including illiterate, low literate, and high literate individuals) share a Basic Language Cognition (BLC) in the domain of oral informal language (Hulstijn, 2015). Finally, I will discuss the possibility that the acquisition of ELM leads to some degree of ‘knowledge parallelism’ between BLC and ELM in literate language users, which has implications for empirical research on individual and situational differences in spoken language processing.