Janet Pierrehumbert is Professor of Linguistics at Northwestern University and received her Ph.D. from MIT in 1980. Pierrehumbert is a laboratory phonologist whose research combines computational and experimental methods. Her model of English intonation, developed in 1978-1988 at MIT and AT&T Bell Labs, laid foundations for the ToBI transcription standard and has been applied in linguistics, psycholinguistics, and speech technology. Since joining the Northwestern faculty in 1989, she has worked on probabilistic models of phonetic variation, phonological grammars, and morphophonology. Her current research uses multi-agent modeling to explore the formation of categories and phonological grammars in individuals and populations. She was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Recent publications include “Phonetic Diversity, Statistical Learning, and Acquisition of Phonology,” in Language and Speech; “Probabilistic Phonology: Discrimination and Robustness,” in Probabilistic Linguistics (MIT Press); “Exemplar Dynamics: Word Frequency, Lenition, and Contrast,” in Frequency Effects and the Emergence of linguistic Structure (John Benjamins); and (with M. Broe) Papers in Laboratory Phonology V: Language Acquisition and the Lexicon (Cambridge University Press).

Explaining Phonological Universals | LSA.108
with Paul Smolensky
TR 4:50-6:30
Three Week Course | First Session