This study investigates neural processes related to phoneme identification in the presence of noise. Differential brain activity for difficult consonant identification task (/b/-/d/) relative to an easier vowel identification task (/a/-/o/) was present in brain regions involved with articulatory planning control (Broca’s area, anterior insula, premotor cortex), instantiation of internal models (cerebellum), and auditory processing regions (STG/S). The results of a correlation analysis of behavioral performance with brain activity, as well as analysis of incorrect versus correct responses suggests that activity in brain regions involved with articulatory planning control is related with poorer performance. These results are inconsistent with hypotheses that articulatory planning areas are utilized to facilitate speech perception. Considerable activity in the cerebellum for correct relative to incorrect responses is consistent with the hypothesis that articulatory-auditory internal models instantiated in the cerebellum are utilized to facilitate phoneme perceptual identification performance.