Janet Breckenridge Pierrehumbert

Dr. Janet Breckenridge Pierrehumbert is a Professor of Language Modeling at Oxford University; an Adjunct Professor at the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain, and Behavior; and External Faculty at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. How do language dynamics – in acquisition, processing, or historical change – relate to the structure of linguistic systems? How do social and cognitive factors interact in shaping human languages? Pierrehumbert explores these questions using experiments, statistical analyses of large corpora, and computational modeling. Most of her work is focused on words. The Pierrehumbert research group looks at how words behave over time, from when they are first created to their eventual success or extinction in linguistic communities. They also evaluate at how words behave at different levels of representation, from variability in their phonetics to discourse-level variability in relation to topic and social identity. Pierrehumbert is known as for her work to develop a model of intonation that has been influential in theoretical linguistics, phonetics, speech technology, and psycholinguistics. She is likewise known as one of the founders of laboratory phonology, or the scientific study of the elements of spoken and signed language, their organization, their grammatical function, and their role in speech communication. Her awards include a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Erskine Fellowship, and election as a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and the Linguistics Society of America in addition to her American Academy of Arts and Sciences membership. Pierrehumbert is the author of the books Japanese Tone Structures, Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 15 and Papers in Laboratory Phonology V: Acquisition and the Lexicon. Her numerous publications appear in journals such as Cognition, Journal of Phonetics, and Phenology.