William J. Barry

Last updated
William J. Barry
Born1943
Alma mater University of Kiel
Known forStudy of phonetics, speech technology
Scientific career
Fields Phonetics
Institutions Saarland University

William John Barry (born 1943 in Ireland) is a phonetician in Germany.

Contents

Academic life

He moved to Germany in his early years and was mainly educated at the University of Kiel by the 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.

Barry's innovative and productive research and his close co-operation 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, Barry held the chair at the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS). [1] He became an emeritus professor in 2008.

Barry is currently[ when? ] a council member of the International Phonetic Association [2] and editor of PHONUS journal. [3]

Selected works

Most of his publications resulted from co-operation with other researchers:

Related Research Articles

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. The field of phonetics is traditionally divided into three sub-disciplines based on the research questions involved such as how humans plan and execute movements to produce speech, how various movements affect the properties of the resulting sound or how humans convert sound waves to linguistic information. Traditionally, the minimal linguistic unit of phonetics is the phone—a speech sound in a language which differs from the phonological unit of phoneme; the phoneme is an abstract categorization of phones and it is also defined as the smallest unit that discerns meaning between sounds in any given language.

The Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA) is a computer-readable phonetic script using 7-bit printable ASCII characters, based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It was originally developed in the late 1980s for six European languages by the EEC ESPRIT information technology research and development program. As many symbols as possible have been taken over from the IPA; where this is not possible, other signs that are available are used, e.g. [@] for schwa, [2] for the vowel sound found in French deux 'two', and [9] for the vowel sound found in French neuf 'nine'.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Voiced alveolar and postalveolar approximants</span> Consonantal sounds represented by ⟨ɹ⟩ / ⟨ð̠˕⟩ and ⟨ɹ̠⟩ in IPA

The voiced alveolar approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the alveolar and postalveolar approximants is ⟨ɹ⟩, a lowercase letter r rotated 180 degrees. The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is r\.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Voiceless uvular fricative</span> Consonantal sound represented by ⟨χ⟩ in IPA

The voiceless uvular fricative is a type of consonantal sound that is used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨χ⟩, the Greek chi. The sound is represented by ⟨x̣⟩ in Americanist phonetic notation. It is sometimes transcribed with ⟨x⟩ in broad transcription.

Isochrony is the postulated rhythmic division of time into equal portions by a language. Rhythm is an aspect of prosody, others being intonation, stress, and tempo of speech.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mid central vowel</span> Vowel sound represented by the schwa, ⟨ə⟩

The mid central vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ə⟩, a rotated lowercase letter e, which is called a "schwa".

Auditory phonetics is the branch of phonetics concerned with the hearing of speech sounds and with speech perception. It thus entails the study of the relationships between speech stimuli and a listener's responses to such stimuli as mediated by mechanisms of the peripheral and central auditory systems, including certain areas of the brain. It is said to compose one of the three main branches of phonetics along with acoustic and articulatory phonetics, though with overlapping methods and questions.

Ignatius G. Mattingly (1927–2004) was a prominent American linguist and speech scientist. Prior to his academic career, he was an analyst for the National Security Agency from 1955 to 1966. He was a Lecturer and then Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut from 1966 to 1996 and a researcher at Haskins Laboratories from 1966 until his death in 2004. He is best known for his pioneering work on speech synthesis and reading and for his theoretical work on the motor theory of speech perception in conjunction with Alvin Liberman. He received his B.A. in English from Yale University in 1947, his M.A. in Linguistics from Harvard University in 1959, and his Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 1968.

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Klaus J. Kohler is a German phonetician.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lilias Armstrong</span> British phonetician (1882–1937)

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Cologne phonetics is a phonetic algorithm which assigns to words a sequence of digits, the phonetic code. The aim of this procedure is that identical sounding words have the same code assigned to them. The algorithm can be used to perform a similarity search between words. For example, it is possible in a name list to find entries like "Meier" under different spellings such as "Maier", "Mayer", or "Mayr". The Cologne phonetics is related to the well known Soundex phonetic algorithm but is optimized to match the German language. The algorithm was published in 1969 by Hans Joachim Postel.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Roach (phonetician)</span> British retired phonetician (born 1943)

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Jane Setter is a British phonetician. She teaches at the University of Reading, where she is Professor of Phonetics. She is best known for work on the pronunciation of British and Hong Kong English, and on speech prosody in atypical populations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dafydd Gibbon</span> British professor

Dafydd Gibbon is a British emeritus professor of English and General Linguistics at Bielefeld University in Germany, specialising in computational linguistics, the lexicography of spoken languages, applied phonetics and phonology. He is particularly concerned with endangered languages and has received awards from the Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Poland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wiktor Jassem</span> Polish phonetician, philologist, and linguist

Wiktor Jassem was a Polish phonetician, philologist, linguist, technical sciences professor, and honourable member of Polish Phonetic Association. He specialized in acoustic phonetics and conducted research on the production of sounds and the processes of understanding of the speech.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wilhelm Viëtor</span>

Carl Adolf Theodor Wilhelm Viëtor was a German phonetician and language educator. He was a central figure in the Reform Movement in language education of the late 19th century, which sought to replace the traditional grammar–translation method with oral language teaching.

Paul Menzerath was a German linguist and experimental phonetician. He discovered that in German, longer words used shorter syllables and he suggested that other languages may also follow this principle and was able to confirm it for Spanish. It was later examined by Gabriel Altmann and the rule is called Menzerath's law or the Menzerath-Altmann law.

References

  1. "16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences", Universität des Saarlandes, 2007
  2. https://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/about.htmlRetrieved February 10, 2014 Archived February 25, 2014, at the Wayback Machine
  3. "Phonetics Group". www.coli.uni-saarland.de. Retrieved February 10, 2014.
  4. ""Time" in the Production and Perception of Speech". AIPUK 12. Arbeitsberichte des Instituts für Phonetik und digitale Sprachverarbeitung der Universität Kiel. 1979. Retrieved June 18, 2020.