Alma mater MIT, Harvard Name Janet Pierrehumbert | Doctoral advisor Morris Halle Books Japanese Tone Structure | |
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Institutions University of Oxford, Northwestern, AT&T Bell Labs Education Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1980), Harvard University (1975) Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada Fields Phonology, Phonetics, Cognitive science Notable awards Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Guggenheim Fellowship | ||
50 years of Linguistics at MIT, Lecture 8
Janet Pierrehumbert is Professor of Language Modeling in the Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. Previously, she was a professor of linguistics at Northwestern University. Her 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. 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 New Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour at the University of Canterbury. Her current research uses on-line experiments and agent-based modeling of speaker populations to model the dynamics of the lexicon in individuals and populations. She has held visiting appointments at Stanford University, Oxford, the Royal Institute of Technology, ENST, École Normale Supérieure, and Stockholm University. 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, Halley Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford.