You are being betrayed by your brain's powerful ability to find patterns that aren't there. In this case, it's ability to fudge anything that sounds like speech

You are being betrayed by your brain's powerful ability to find patterns that aren't there. In this case, it's ability to fudge anything that sounds like speech to fit into the boxes for phonemes that you are familiar with. This what makes getting a good accent in a foreign language hard: if you don't train yourself properly, you won't be able to hear the correct pronunciations, let alone reproduce them consistently. The article addresses exactly this point, and acknowledges that plenty of other linguists already argued for it. The counter argument is "I fed this into a spectral analyzer, and there are no vowels on the spectrograph." Care to claim your ears are more accurate than the computer?