Janet Pierrehumbert

Janet Pierrehumbert

Fields Phonology
Institutions Northwestern, AT&T Bell Labs
Alma mater MIT, Harvard
Doctoral advisor Morris Halle
Notable awards Fellow of the AAAS, Guggenheim Fellowship

Janet Pierrehumbert /pɪərˈhʌmbərt/ 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.[1][2] It has been widely influential in speech technology, psycholinguistics, and theories of language form and meaning.[3] She is also one of the founders of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, an interdisciplinary initiative to develop advanced scientific methods for studying language sound structure.

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 École nationale supérieure des télécommunications, and the École Normale Supérieure. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996, and is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

References and publications

  1. ^ Pierrehumbert, J. The phonology and phonetics of English intonation. PhD thesis, MIT. Distributed 1988, Indiana University Linguistics Club.
  2. ^ Pierrehumbert, J. and M. Beckman (1988) Japanese Tone Structure, Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 15, MIT Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-0-262-66063-1
  3. ^ http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jbp/publications/publications.html

See also

Janet Pierrehumbert homepage at Northwestern (http://babel.ling.northwestern.edu/~jbp/home.html)