Alvin Liberman

Alvin Liberman

Alvin Meyer Liberman (May 10, 1917 - Jan. 13, 2000) was born in St. Joseph, Missouri. Liberman was an American psychologist.

Liberman received his A.B. degree from the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri in 1938, his M.A. degree from the University of Missouri in 1939 and his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University in 1942 . His ideas set the agenda for fifty years of research in the psychology of speech perception and laid the groundwork for modern computer speech synthesis and the understanding of critical issues in cognitive science. He took a biological perspective on language and his 'nativist' approach was often controversial as well as being influential. He was a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut and of linguistics at Yale University as well as president of Haskins Laboratories from 1975 through 1986. Liberman had a distinctive goal in mind. In order to reach this goal, he developed a project where he was to produce the sound output of a reading machine for the blind, a device that could scan, print, and produce a selective acoustic pattern for every component of the English alphabet. His paper on the "Perception of the Speech Code" in 1967 remains one of the most cited papers in the psychological literature. He is also known for his pioneering work with Dr. Franklin S. Cooper on the development of the reading machine for the blind in 1944. He is also known for the development of the motor theory of speech perception with Ignatius Mattingly in the 1960s and 1970s. Along with his wife, Isabelle Liberman, he elucidated the "alphabetic principle" and its relationship to phonemic awareness and phonological awareness in reading. He was a member of the National Academies of Science and of many other distinguished scientific societies.After retiring ，Al remained an active,influential presence in the international scientific community. His publication record, which began in 1944 with an article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, ended in 2000 with an article, coauthored with Douglas Whalen of Haskins Laboratories，in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

On January 13, 2000, Alvin Liberman died due to problems that occurred after heart surgery. His son Mark Liberman is Trustee Professor of Phonetics and Professor of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. His son M. Charles Liberman is Professor of Otology and Laryngology at Harvard Medical School. His daughter, Sarah Ash, is an Associate Professor of Nutrition in the Department of Food, Bioprocessing, and Nutrition Sciences at North Carolina State University.