Abstract The human language is an evolved form of communication comprised of written and spoken word. The spoken word, otherwise known as speech, is undeniably a complex form of communication that only human beings possess. It is more than just sounds made up of pitch, tone, or melodic rhythms that animals use to communicate with each other. It is composed of lexical information that the brain is able to interpret and make sense of. It is used to convey feeling, thoughts, and ideas in a way that is unique to human beings. This paper will provide a basic overview of the formation of speech and how it’s perceived. The Perception of Human Speech The human language is a highly complex and evolved form of communication that is comprised of written and spoken words. The spoken word, otherwise known as speech, is undeniably the most complex form of communication there is and is one that only human beings are able to possess. Because speech is such a complex spoken language, it is notably the most significant type of communication that has evolved on the planet that separates human beings from the animal kingdom. This is because animals communicate and exchange information by sound, but human beings are unique in that they use speech to convey ideas, thoughts and emotions to each other. This vocalization of what we feel and being able to communicate what the brain is thinking through speech has prompted many studies on speech perception. How these thoughts, ideas, and emotions are conveyed through speech and are perceived by the brain cannot simply be explained by any single type of study on the subject. Because of this, there are many different types of research on speech perception and it is carried out by various groups of scientist and researchers. In a paper by Brian C.J., M., Tyler, L. K., & Marslen-Wilson, W. (2008) some of the different types of studies include research from an auditory perspective which focus on the acoustical properties of the sound of speech, psycholinguistic perspectives studies which focus on the processes by which representations of meaning are extracted from the acoustic–phonetic sequence, and research into the neural bases of auditory and linguistic functions which focuses more on the cognitive aspects of speech. In their study they attempt to take those different types of basic and advanced speech research and theories, from basic sound production to research involved in complex cognitive theories, and unify them to determine how the meaning of speech is perceived. This paper will simply discuss some of the basics of speech perception on how speech is formed and understood. The production of speech sounds is created in the vocal tract. These speech sounds are called formants and are the frequency components of human speech which contain audible information that allow us to distinguish between vowels. There are also small audible sounds that make up human speech and are called phonemes. They allow for different words to be distinguished and will be discussed first. The English language supposedly contains 40 different phonemes. Mather (2011). Phonemes are pretty much the basic unit of language in general.