Haskins Publications

Number	365
Year	1982
Drawer	6
Entry Date	06/15/1999
Authors	Liberman, A. M.
Contact
Publication	American Psychologist, 37, 148-167.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0365.pdf
Abstract	A largely unsuccessful attempt to communicate phonological segments by sounds other than speech led my colleagues and me to ask why speech does it so well. The answer came the more slowly because we were wedded to a “horizontal” view of language, seeing it as a biologically arbitrary assemblage of processes that are not themselves linguistic. Accordingly, we expected to find the answer in general processes of auditory perception, to which the acoustic signal had been made to conform by appropriate regulation of the movements of articulation. What we found was the opposite: specialized processes of phonetic perception that had been made to conform to the acoustic consequences of the way articulatory movements are regulated. The distinctively linguistic function of these specializations is to provide for efficient perception of phonetic structures that can also be efficiently produced. to assume that a phonetic specialization exists accords well with a “vertical” view of language, in which the underlying activities are seen as coherent and distinctive. recent evidence for such special processes comes from experiments designed to investigate the integration of cues.
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