in psychology of speech, dies
A memorial service will be held on Saturday, Feb. 12, for Alvin M. Liberman, a professor emeritus of linguistics whose research laid the ground for modern computer speech synthesis.
Professor Liberman, who was 82, died of complications following open heart surgery on Jan. 13. He lived in Mansfield, Connecticut.
The service will be held at 3 p.m. in the Von Der Mehden Recital Hall at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. Liberman was also professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Connecticut.
Professor Liberman was noted for his work on the psychology of speech and the process of reading. His research was largely responsible for drawing speech into the mainstream of experimental cognitive psychology. He had served as president and director of research at the Yale-affiliated Haskins Laboratory in New Haven.
The goal of Professor Liberman's early work, which was sponsored by the Veteran's Administration after World War II, was to develop the sound output of a reading machine for the blind, a device that would scan print and produce a distinctive acoustic pattern for each letter of the alphabet. Despite years of effort, Professor Liberman and his colleagues at Haskins Laboratory never succeeded in devising an acoustic array that listeners could follow faster than the Morse code, which -- at only one-tenth the normal speaking rate -- is far too slow for extended use.
This failure raised the question to which Professor Liberman devoted much of the rest of his career: Why is speech so much faster and more efficient as a carrier of linguistic information than other sounds?
His experimentation during the 1950s and 1960s led Professor Liberman to conclude that speech is not an arbitrary signal that just happened to be available as language evolved but, rather, is an integral part of language. Furthermore, he concluded that consonants and vowels, the discrete phonemic elements essential for a sizeable lexicon, are overlapped, or encoded, into syllables. Human listeners, he found, are biologically adapted to decode the continuously variable signal of running speech and to recover its discrete phonemic components.
Professor Liberman and his colleagues at Haskins also discovered many of the main acoustic cues to the consonants and vowels of English. These cues later served to guide the development of artificial speech synthesis, now widely used for machine-to-human communication.
Some of Professor Liberman's ideas created controversy, and throughout his life, he continued conducting experiments to prove what he called his "unconventional view" to other experimental psychologists.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Professor Liberman increasingly collaborated with his wife, the late Isabelle Joffe Liberman, and with other Haskins Laboratory scientists on reading. A central discovery of this work was that children who have difficulty in learning to read almost always lack what Isabelle Liberman termed "phoneme awareness"; they cannot easily learn to break a word into its component consonants and vowels. The critical requirement of phoneme awareness for learning to read alphabetic print is now internationally recognized, in large part due to the Libermans' passionate advocacy of the "alphabetic principle" against the "whole word," or "sight reading," method of instruction.
Professor Liberman was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Acoustical Society of America. His many awards include the Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, honorary doctoral degrees from the State University of New York and the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and a medal from the Collège de France.
Mr. Liberman is survived by two sons, Mark Liberman of Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and Charles Liberman of Milton, Massachusetts; a daughter, Sarah Ash of Raleigh, North Carolina; and nine grandchildren. Memorial contributions may be made to the Alvin Liberman Memorial Fund, c/o Haskins Laboratory, 270 Crown St., New Haven, CT 06511-6695.
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