Man could not perceive speech well if each phoneme were cued by a unit sound. In fact, many phonemes are encoded so that a single acoustic cue carries information in parallel about successive phonemic segments. This reduces the rate at which discrete sounds must be perceived, but at the price of a complex relation between cue and phoneme: cues vary greatly with context, and there are, in these cases, no commutable acoustic segments of phonemic size. Phoneme perception therefore requires a special decoder. A possible model supposes that the encoding occurs below the level of the (invariant) neuromotor commands to the articulatory muscles. The decoder may then identify phonemes by referring the incoming speech sounds to those commands.

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