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Faculty Affiliates |
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Janet Pierrehumbert Janet Pierrehumbert, (Ph.D. MIT), Professor of Linguistics (also affiliated with the Program in Music Cognition). Her research deals with the cognitive representation of sound structure. She deals with the ways in which native speakers' implicit knowledge of the sound system of their language enable them to utter new sentences with a native accent, accurately perceive speech by others, create new word forms, and appropriately modify words that they are borrowing into their language from other languages. Her work combines evidence from experiments on speech production and perception with evidence from on-line dictionaries and corpora. Pierrehumbert spent her most recent sabbatical at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications (ENST) in Paris where she held a CNRS Poste Rouge. Currently she is engaged (together with NU linguist Jeffrey Lidz) in a collaborative research with the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives and Psycholinguistique (LSCP, recently relocated to the ENS)), a comparative study between French and English concerning the way the language acquisition process is shaped and constrained by the nature of the language system. A FIG travel grant was instrumental in obtaining her a larger grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation to support this collaboration; she spent the academic year 2003-04 at the LSCP, developing a computational model of phonological acquisition and change in populations. Pierrehumbert is a past recipient of an NSF Faculty Awards for Women Scientists and Engineers (1991-96) and a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship (1996/97); more recently she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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