In the 1960s, researchers at Yale University’s Haskins Laboratories attempted to produce a machine that would read printed text aloud to blind people. Alvin Liberman and his colleagues figured the solution was to isolate the “phonemes,” the ostensible beads-on-a-string equivalent to movable type that linguists thought existed in the acoustic speech signal. Linguists had assumed (and some still do) that phonemes were roughly equivalent to the letters of the alphabet and that they could be recombined to form different words. However, when the Haskins group snipped segments from tape recordings of words or sentences spoken by radio announcers or trained phoneticians, and tried to link them together to form new words, the researchers found that the results were incomprehensible.1
That’s because, as most speech scientists agree, there is no such thing as pure phonemes (though some linguists still cling to the idea). Discrete phonemes do not exist as such in ...
