Speech

Alvin Liberman and his colleagues at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven created the techniques, the methods, and the insights appropriate to the study of speech perception. This volume brings together a carefully edited collection of twenty-three of their most important research articles, along with an introduction by Liberman that charts the progress of the research - the errors as well as the hits - over the past five decades. Liberman has been the main analytic and synthesizing scientist in the development of a field that holds a fascination for anyone interested in the place of speech in the biological scheme of things. The more specific implications cover a broad range: at the one extreme, the problems associated with the machine production and recognition of speech; at the other, our understanding of how children learn to read its alphabetic transcriptions, and why some cannot.