After two years' service in the US Army in Vietnam,[2] he enrolled in graduate school in linguistics at MIT, from which he received a Master of Science (1972) and a PhD (1975).
Liberman's main research interests lie in phonetics, prosody, and other aspects of speech communication.
In 2017, Liberman was the recipient of the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award.
[5] Liberman is also the founder of (and frequent contributor to) Language Log, a blog with a broad cast of dozens of professional linguists.
In 2012, Liberman and Steven Bird began a US$101,501 project "to use mobile telephones to collect larger amounts of data on undocumented endangered languages than would ever be possible through usual fieldwork.