LEIGH LISKER (1918—2006)
Patti Price
Comments on Leigh Lisker
I love VOT (Voice Onset Time), and rapid and rabid are just about my favorite words. But, my career in phonetics and with Dr. Lisker did not start out auspiciously: He had a heart attack shortly after the start of my first phonetics course, and was absent most of that semester, and I failed the phonetics question on the prelims (something about binary features).
But! VOT was calling to me. Why? So much of linguistics seemed so discrete (words, morphemes, phonetic symbols, ...) but we do not produce speech like a keyboard produces a letter one at a time. Our mouths and tongues and laryngeal muscles move more continuously, with discontinuities as they bump into each other. What VOT did for me was to make real and concrete the idea of how more or less independent and relatively slow articulators can work together to achieve faster rates of speech than would be possible with any one of them, and with a much richer set of possible acoustic outputs.
I love VOT because it makes so clear and concrete that words like, to pick two at random, rapid and rabid can be gesturally the same from the chin up, distinguished by the larynx coordinating with the parts above it to determine exactly when to do its thing.
I love VOT because it makes so clear and concrete how one continuum, degree of voicing, can be available to all languages to choose where to draw the line between 'more voiced' and 'less voiced' (or possibly even less voiced than that)... so that the distinction, for example, between a b and a p can be maintained in many different languages, even though the ps of one language may be acoustically very like the bs of another (sort of like the way in quilting the lights and the darks form the pattern, but any given color can be a light or a dark depending on the system it finds itself in.).
And I love VOT because it linked Lisker with Abramson, or Uncle Doctor Arthur, as he prefers. Both with considerable charm. Even better together. Seemingly so different! Talking speed is but one dimension. I used to tell myself that they formerly were much more alike, but one decided the other spoke too quickly and maybe he could slow the other down by talking more slowly himself. But that faster talking one was thinking that he could speed up the other by talking more quickly and by finishing his sentences for him. So they grew to be comfortably complementary. It worked.
I loved VOT and I loved phonetics, but I was not so sure I wanted to be in grad school and decided to leave after 2 years. Dr. Lisker never said this would be a mistake. But he did say "Why don't you come work at Haskins for the summer?" And invisibly to me, he made that happen. And I stayed and I finished. Thanks for that. So much.
Not to say that I didn't occasionally have misgivings... like the time I realized that the comments I got back on some chapter were from some much earlier version at least a couple of months old.
I remember his stories about taking 6 months to make a set of stimuli for an experiment, slicing audio tape with a razor blade, standing at the spectrograph machine to see exactly where he had sliced -- standing so long that his arches fell. He used to say that when it took 6 months to prepare an experiment (compared to 6 minutes with modern equipment and software), you had to think much more about what you were doing and why.
He was never self-promoting, always respectful of others, always in search of truth and knowledge and fitting pieces together. And VOT was one of the great areas that fit quite a lot of fine pieces together and inspired much work by many, many others. Dr. Lisker was important to the world of phonetics. He was important to me personally because of those crucial nudges (toward Haskins, toward finishing a PhD), but most important as a role model.
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