"Perception of the speech code" revisited: Speech is alphabetic after all.

Abstract

We revisit an article, "Perception of the Speech Code" (PSC), published in this journal 50 years ago (Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler, & Studdert-Kennedy, 1967) and address one of its legacies concerning the status of phonetic segments, which persists in theories of speech today. In the perspective of PSC, segments both exist (in language as known) and do not exist (in articulation or the acoustic speech signal). Findings interpreted as showing that speech is not a sound alphabet, but, rather, phonemes are encoded in the signal, coupled with findings that listeners perceive articulation, led to the motor theory of speech perception, a highly controversial legacy of PSC. However, a second legacy, the paradoxical perspective on segments has been mostly unquestioned. We remove the paradox by offering an alternative supported by converging evidence that segments exist in language both as known and as used. We support the existence of segments in both language knowledge and in production by showing that phonetic segments are articulatory and dynamic and that coarticulation does not eliminate them. We show that segments leave an acoustic signature that listeners can track. This suggests that speech is well-adapted to public communication in facilitating, not creating a barrier to, exchange of language forms.