Janet Pierrehumbert

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Janet Pierrehumbert is a professor of Linguistics at Northwestern University whose research uses experimental and computational methods to study the sound structure of language. She developed an intonational model which includes a grammar of intonation patterns and an explicit algorithm for calculating pitch contours in speech, as well as an account of intonational meaning. It has been widely influential in speech technology, psycholinguistics, and theories of language form and meaning.^{[citation needed]} She is also one of the founders of laboratory phonology, an interdisciplinary initiative to develop advanced scientific methods for studying language sound structure.^{[citation needed]}

At Northwestern, Pierrehumbert is also affiliated with the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, the Music Cognition Program, and the French Interdisciplinary Group. Her current research, funded by the Studying Complex Systems Program of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, uses agent-based modeling of speaker populations to model the formation of language sound systems in individuals and populations. She has held visiting appointments at Stanford University, Oxford, the Royal Institute of Technology, the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications, and the Ecole Normale Superieure.