Mary Esther Beckman | |
---|---|
Born | September 1953 (age 70) |
Academic background | |
Education | Cornell University (PhD) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | linguistics |
Sub-discipline | phonetics |
Institutions | Ohio State University |
Doctoral students | Keith Allan Johnson,Mariapaola D'Imperio |
Mary Esther Beckman (born September 1953) is a Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the Ohio State University.
Beckman received her PhD from Cornell University in 1984. She was a Postdoctoral member of the technical staff in "Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence Research" at AT&T Bell Laboratories,Murray Hill,NJ,before joining the linguistics faculty at Ohio State University in 1985. She has directed at least twenty-five PhD dissertations to completion at Ohio State University.
Her early research focused on prosody and the development of the Tones and Boundary Indexes (ToBI) system of intonation transcription. [1] More recently her work has focused on phonological disorders and child language acquisition. [2]
Perhaps her most significant contribution to linguistics is the fact that in 1987,together with John Kingston,she organized the first Laboratory Phonology conference at Columbus,Ohio. [3] She served with Kingston as series editor for the Cambridge University Press series Papers in Laboratory Phonology from 1987 through 2004. The laboratory phonology movement was one of the two most important developments during the 1990s in the linguistic subdisciplines that study language sound systems,and gave rise to the Association for Laboratory Phonology. (The other important development was Optimality Theory.)
In 1988 she won a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation.
She edited the Journal of Phonetics from 1990 to 1994.
Beckman was inducted as a Fellow in the Linguistic Society of America in 2011. [4] In 2015,she received the Scientific Achievement Medal of the International Speech Communication Association. [5]
Beckman was married to John S. Cikoski,a specialist for Classical Chinese. Cikoski died in 2022. [6]
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either:
Janet Pierrehumbert is Professor of Language Modelling in the Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. 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. Pierrehumbert is also affiliated with the New Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour at the University of Canterbury.
Patricia Ann Keating is an American linguist and noted phonetician. She is distinguished research professor emeritus at UCLA.
Catherine Phebe Browman was an American linguist and speech scientist. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1978. Browman was a research scientist at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey (1967–1972). While at Bell Laboratories, she was known for her work on speech synthesis using demisyllables. She later worked as researcher at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut (1982–1998). She was best known for developing, with Louis Goldstein, of the theory of articulatory phonology, a gesture-based approach to phonological and phonetic structure. The theoretical approach is incorporated in a computational model that generates speech from a gesturally-specified lexicon. Browman was made an honorary member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.
The phonology of second languages is different from the phonology of first languages in various ways. The differences are considered to come from general characteristics of second languages, such as slower speech rate, lower proficiency than native speakers, and from the interaction between non-native speakers' first and second languages.
ToBI is a set of conventions for transcribing and annotating the prosody of speech. The term "ToBI" is sometimes used to refer to the conventions used for describing American English specifically, which was the first ToBI system, developed by Mary Beckman and Janet Pierrehumbert, among others. Other ToBI systems have been defined for a number of languages; for example, J-ToBI refers to the ToBI conventions for Tokyo Japanese, and an adaptation of ToBI to describe Dutch intonation was developed by Carlos Gussenhoven, and called ToDI. Another variation of ToBI, called IViE, was established in 1998 to enable comparison between several dialects of British English.
The Association for Laboratory Phonology is a non-profit professional society for researchers interested in the sound structure of language. It was founded to promote the scientific study of all aspects of phonetics and phonology of oral and sign languages through scholarly exchange across disciplines and through the use of a hybrid methodology. The founding and honorary members are Amalia Arvaniti, Mary Beckman, Cathi Best, Catherine Browman, Jennifer S. Cole, Mariapaola D'Imperio, Louis M. Goldstein, José Ignacio Hualde, Patricia Keating, John Kingston, D.R. Ladd, Peter Ladefoged, Janet Pierrehumbert, Caroline Smith, Paul Warren, and Douglas Whalen. The Association is an international body open to scholars world-wide, and currently has over 100 members.
Jennifer Sandra Cole is a professor of linguistics and Director of the Prosody and Speech Dynamics Lab at Northwestern University. Her research uses experimental and computational methods to study the sound structure of language. She was the founding General Editor of Laboratory Phonology (2009–2015) and a founding member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.
Laboratory phonology is an approach to phonology that emphasizes the synergy between phonological theory and scientific experiments, including laboratory studies of human speech and experiments on the acquisition and productivity of phonological patterns. The central goal of laboratory phonology is "gaining an understanding of the relationship between the cognitive and physical aspects of human speech" through the use of an interdisciplinary approach that promotes scholarly exchange across disciplines, bridging linguistics with psychology, electrical engineering, and computer science, and other fields. Although spoken speech has represented the major area of research, the investigation of sign languages and manual signs as encoding elements is also included in laboratory phonology. Important antecedents of the field include work by Kenneth N. Stevens and Gunnar Fant on the acoustic theory of speech production, Ilse Lehiste's work on prosody and intonation, and Peter Ladefoged's work on typological variation and methods for data capture. Current research in laboratory phonology draws heavily on the theories of metrical phonology and autosegmental phonology which are sought to be tested with help of experimental procedures, in laboratory settings, or through linguistic data collection at field sites, and though evaluation with statistical methods, such as exploratory data analysis.
Ilse Lehiste was an Estonian-born American linguist, author of many studies in phonetics.
Pitch accent is a term used in autosegmental-metrical theory for local intonational features that are associated with particular syllables. Within this framework, pitch accents are distinguished from both the abstract metrical stress and the acoustic stress of a syllable. Different languages specify different relationships between pitch accent and stress placement.
Julia Hirschberg is an American computer scientist noted for her research on computational linguistics and natural language processing.
Ellen Broselow is an experimental linguist specializing in second language acquisition and phonology. Since 1983, she has been on the faculty of SUNY Stony Brook University, where she has held the position of Professor of Linguistics since 1993.
Elisabeth O. Selkirk is a theoretical linguist specializing in phonological theory and the syntax-phonology interface. She is currently a professor emerita in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Patrice (Pam) Speeter Beddor is John C. Catford Collegiate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan, focusing on phonology and phonetics. Her research has dealt with phonetics, including work in coarticulation, speech perception, and the relationship between perception and production.
Megan Jane Crowhurst is an Australian- and Canadian-raised linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States.
Donca Steriade is a Romanian-American professor of Linguistics at MIT, specializing in phonological theory.
Cynthia G. Clopper is an American linguist and professor and chair of the linguistics department at Ohio State University. Clopper is known for her work on dialect perception, including cross-dialect lexical processing and regional prosodic variation in American English.
Diane Brentari is an American linguist who specializes in sign languages and American Sign Language in particular.
Laura J. Downing is an American linguist, specializing in the phonology of African languages.