William John Barry (born 1943 in Ireland) is one of the leading phoneticians in Germany. He came to Germany in his early years and was mainly educated at the University of Kiel by the renowned German phonetician Klaus J. Kohler. In 1992 he was appointed to the Chair of Phonetics at Saarland University. His principal research areas were speech synthesis, rhythm and segmental structures, the application of linguistics to questions of pronunciation learning, speech-language pathology and speech technology in general.
William J. Barry's innovative and productive research and his close cooperation with the Institute of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University as well as with the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (also Saarbruecken) made the Saarbruecken Institute of Phonetics an outstanding pillar of science in Europe. In 2007, W. J. Barry held the chair at the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS). He became an emeritus professor in 2008.
Barry is currently a Council Member of the International Phonetic Association and editor of PHONUS journal.
Most of his publications resulted from the cooperation with other researchers:
2008: "Do we need a symbol for a central open vowel?" Journal of the International Phonetic Association 38 No. 3, 2008, 349-357.
2007: Rhythm as an L2 problem: How prosodic is it?
2006: Strength of British English accents in altered listening conditions
2005: Phonetic knowledge in speech technology - and phonetic knowledge from speech technology (Springer Verlag)
2004: Methodische Aspekte der auditiven Bewertung von Stimmqualität
2004: Interaction between segmental structure and rhythm. A look at Italian dialects and regional standard Italian
2003: Do Rhythm Measures Tell us Anything about Language Type?
2002: The Phonetics and Phonology of English Pronunciation (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier)
2002: Differential weighting of phonetic properties in cross-dialectal perception
2001: Must diphone synthesis be so unnatural?
2001: Cross-language Similarities and Differences in Spontaneous Speech Patterns
2000: The prosody of excitement in horse race commentaries
1999: Soziophonetische Betrachtungen zu deutschen Dialekten in Lothringen (Frankreich) Folia Linguistica XXXII, 3-4, 1999, 161-199
1999: Trends und Ergebnisse der phonetischen Forschung und ihr Nutzen für den Fremdsprachenunterricht
1998: Time as a factor in the acoustic variation of schwa.'
1998: Implications of energy declination for speech synthesis.
1997: Another R-tickle Journal of the International Phonetics Association 27 (1 & 2), 1997, 35-45.
1996: Some fundamental problems of looking at connected speech
1996: The relevance of phonetics for pronunciation teaching
1995: Schwa vs. schwa + /r/ in German
1979: "Time" in the Production and Perception of Speech (with Klaus J. Kohler)
