Janet Pierrehumbert

Janet Pierrehumbert (2011)

Janet Breckenridge Pierrehumbert (* 1954 ) is an American linguist . She has been teaching and researching at the University of Oxford since 2015 , after having worked at Northwestern University for 22 years . She primarily deals with aspects of phonology and phonetics , but also combines this with approaches from engineering and researches questions of language technology .

Career

Janet Pierre Humbert began her academic training at the Harvard University , from 1975 to the Bachelor in Linguistics received. She then moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she received her Ph.D. PhD . From 1980 to 1989 she worked as a research assistant at Bell Laboratories , where she dealt with speech recognition and artificial intelligence, among other things . In parallel, she spent shorter periods at elite universities, so she only stayed two years at MIT (1980–1982) and later worked at Stanford University (1994–1995) and at the Royal Technical University in Stockholm .

In 1989 Pierrehumbert moved to Northwestern University , where she worked for four years as an assistant professor before she was appointed to a full professorship in linguistics in 1993. Further stays abroad followed, for example at the École normal supérieure (1996–1997), the Center national de la recherche scientifique (1997) and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (2003–2004), both in France. She held the professorship at Northwestern University for 22 years before joining the University of Oxford in Great Britain in 2015 . Since then she has been Professor of Language Modeling at the Oxford e-Research Center . She has also been a visiting professor (Adjunct Professor) at the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behavior at the University of Canterbury , New Zealand, since 2012 .

Scientific work

Pierrehumbert mainly deals with phonology and phonetics , for example with the sound structure of individual words over the course of time. In addition to English, she also examines other languages ​​such as Japanese, Finnish and Arabic. In addition, she pursues engineering approaches in the field of language technology , so she developed an algorithm to record or measure aspects of intonation . Another focus is the study of the vocabulary of individuals or social groups.

Pierrehumbert was a Guggenheim Fellow , is a member of the Linguistic Society of America and the Cognitive Science Society and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019 .

Personal

Pierrehumbert is married to the geophysicist Raymond Pierrehumbert , who also works at the University of Oxford.

Web links

• Profile on the website of the University of Oxford
• Curriculum Vitae on the website of the University of Oxford (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter P. (PDF; 649 kB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Retrieved December 13, 2017 .