Alvin M. Liberman
Haskins Laboratories
May 10, 1917 - January 13, 2000
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Scientific Discipline: Psychological and Cognitive Sciences Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1976)
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Psychologist Alvin M. Liberman was responsible for establishing speech as a fundamental branch of experimental cognitive psychology. He researched speech perception, or the process of identifying the consonants and vowels that compose words, to determine why speech was the most efficient carrier of linguistic information. He discovered the main acoustic cues for most of the consonants and vowels in the English language, which guided the development of modern artificial speech synthesis. While attempting to construct a reading machine for the blind and visible speech displays for the deaf, Liberman found that what the listener heard was determined by a particular acoustic wave pattern, as well as the patterns that preceded and followed it. This explained the speed with which speech was decoded by the listener, and it led to a multitude of future studies on speech cognizance. Along with his wife Isabelle, an expert on reading disabilities, Liberman proposed that children who had trouble learning to read were nearly always unable to learn phoneme awareness, or the ability to break a word down into consonants and vowels. The couple’s results established phoneme awareness as an internationally recognized necessity in education.
Liberman attended the University of Missouri, receiving his B.A. degree in 1938 and his M.A. degree in 1939. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University three years later. He was an instructor at Yale from 1942 to 1943 and 1945 to 1946; he worked as a research associate for Haskins Laboratories in 1944. After teaching as an assistant professor at Wesleyan University from 1946 to 1949, Liberman started his long tenure at the University of Connecticut. He rose to an associate professor in 1950, a full professor in 1954, and head of the psychology department from 1961 to 1969. He was also an adjunct professor of linguistics at Yale University from 1968 until his retirement. He was appointed the president and director of research at Haskins Laboratories in 1975. Liberman was affiliated with the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the Acoustical Society of America, and the American Psychological Association. For his contributions to cognitive psychology, he received the Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 1975, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association in 1980, the F. O. Schmitt Medal and Prize in Neuroscience in 1988, and the Outstanding Scientific Contribution Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading in 1997.
