LEIGH LISKER (1918—2006)

Greg Guy
Comments on Leigh Lisker

Leigh Lisker taught me most of what I know about phonetics, and as it turned out, he taught me much more than I realized at the time. He used a kind of socratic approach to teaching, posing questions and more questions, but rarely giving answers. I found this fairly frustrating at first, wanting to get straight to the answer, the solution, but eventually I accommodated, and then began to enjoy and anticipate it. I would prepare for his classes by trying to anticipate the day's questions, and I would leave them with a list of things I needed to figure out. I did several research papers and experiments for him that I was really excited about -- doing them made me feel like I was learning the methods that would always enable me to find out answers for myself.

Since leaving Penn for the wider academic world, I have discovered—over and over again—how much insight into issues, processes and theories I learned from Leigh's teaching and mentoring. I think this is true of his students generally: as a result of the way he taught us, many things about speech which are a puzzle or a surprise to other well-qualified phoneticians appear self-evident to those of us who learned via the 'Lisker method'. Leigh was unique among my professors in his ability to instill complete competence and confidence in his students. His students graduated not just knowing phonetics, but DOING phonetics. From his teaching, we acquired not only a knowledge of the field, but an understanding of the big picture, what the issues are, how things work. He was studying the phonetics/phonology interface long before the term was coined and he had a sensible view of how its component parts worked together; better yet, he could figure out an experiment to address any question which wasn't clear. His mentoring left me feeling at home, and happy, in every phonetics lab I've ever set foot in. The world is a poorer place without him.

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