Liberman was one of the first to conduct research and experimental studies in the field of speech development and linguistics. Through his research he aimed to gain a thorough understanding of the importance and purpose of speech in the act of reading and the process of learning to read. Some of his profound investigations were made during his time at Haskins Laboratories where he worked as a research scientist trying to investigate the relationships between speech and acoustics. From his research he came up with the idea that we hear spoken words much differently than sounds. It was evident to Liberman that speech, the speed at which someone says something in particular, is connected to the word's amount of syllables, or in other terms its "acoustic complexity" (Whalen, 2000).