Some Assumptions about Speech and How They Changed*

My aim is to provide a brief account of the research on speech at Haskins Laboratories as seen from my point of view. In pursuit of that aim, I will scant most experiments and their outcomes, putting the emphasis, rather, on the changing assumptions that, as I understood them, guided the research or were guided by it. I will be particularly concerned to describe the development of those assumptions, hewing as closely as I can to the order in which they were made, and theneither abandoned or extended. My account is necessarily inaccurate, not just because I must rely in part on memory about my state of mind almost 50 years ago when, in the earliest stages of our work, we did not always make our underlying assumptions explicit, but, even more, for reasons that put a proper account beyond the reach of any recall, however true. The chief difficulty is in the relation between the theoretical assumptions and the research they were supposed to rationalize. Thus, it happened only once, as I see it now, that the assumptions changed promptly in response to the results of a particular experiment; in all other cases, they lagged behind, as reinterpretations of data that had accumulated over a considerable period of time. Moreover, theory was influenced. not only by our empirical findings, but equally, if even more belatedly, by general considerations of plausibility that arose when, stimulated by colleagues and by the gradual broadening of my own outlook, I began to give proper consideration to the special