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][4] 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.

Pierrehumbert is also affiliated with the Northwestern University Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and the New Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour at the University of Canterbury. Her current research uses agent-based modeling of speaker populations to model the dynamics of language sound systems in individuals and populations. She has held visiting appointments at Stanford University, Oxford, the Royal Institute of Technology, ENST, 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, the Linguistic Society of America, and the Cognitive Science Society. She held the Edward Sapir Professorship at the 2013 Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute hosted by the University of Michigan.

Pierrehumbert is married to Raymond Pierrehumbert, Louis Block Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago and contributor to RealClimate.

References and publications

  1. ↑ Pierrehumbert, J. B. The phonology and phonetics of English intonation. PhD thesis, MIT. Distributed 1988, Indiana University Linguistics Club.
  2. ↑ Pierrehumbert, J. B. and Mary E. 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
  4. ↑ http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ebzKiiwAAAAJ&hl=en

See also

Janet Pierrehumbert homepage at Northwestern (http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jbp/)