Contributors

In 1968, Phillip Lieberman was taking a bath when he heard a radio report on WGBH, Boston’s NPR affiliate, that dramatically changed his life. “Bill Cavness was reading a book by Loren Eisley about why apes can’t talk, and I wondered why,” he says. At the time, Lieberman was working on his PhD thesis at MIT, investigating how breathing patterns change during human speech. The thesis later became one of the first books published by the MIT Press. “I got this phone call saying, would I mind if they published my thesis,” Lieberman recalls, laughing. “I said, no, obviously I don’t mind.” The cognitive scientist would go on to publish half a dozen more books on human speech. He had initially started studying speech while he was researching secure communications for the US Air Force during the Vietnam War. The 1968 NPR piece piqued his interest in how the vocal ...