Revisiting Spoken and Musical Phonemic Production and Comprehension

Introduction There is a rich tradition in the study of spoken and sung phoneme production and comprehension that discusses an increased level of difficulty in accurate phoneme identification in musical form, especially at higher pitches (Sundberg 1970, 1987, Benolken and Swanson 1988). The tacit assumption is that production and comprehension of phonemes in speech is much more regularized than when embedded in musical form and does not present significant difficulty for speakers. However, the work of Philip Lieberman (2006) in particular brings into question certain assumptions about the unambiguous production and interpretation of phonemes in speech. Specifically, Lieberman contextualizes the findings of Barney and Peterson (1952) and Hillenbrand et al. (1995) to demonstrate that spoken phoneme production in contemporary standard English involves a much greater amount of vowel overlap than is generally acknowledged in the field.