Dr. Janet Pierrehumbert will use a grant from the NSF Faculty Awards for Women Program to pursue her research at the critical interface between phonetics and phonology, between the physical properties of speech sounds and their abstract mental representations. The immediate focus of her research will be on the phonetics of words as they are produced in sentences, with special attention to the constraints on syllable adjacency and the interaction of sentence-level intonational contours with word structure and phonetics. Previous research (to which Dr. Pierrehumbert has made important contributions) has given us a fairly firm understanding of the phonetic and phonological characteristics of syllables, and of sentence-level prosodic contours. The word level is where these two systems interact, and here we have only sketchy, tantalizing evidence so far of the constraints and patterns which apply. The research plan is to determine those constraints empirically, and then develop a theoretical model of the phonetics and phonology of word-formation in English. The model promises to advance our understanding of the relationship between phonetics and phonology, one of the most fundamental issues in linguistic science. It will also have potential applications in such technologies as speech recognition and speech synthesis. In addition to furthering Dr. Pierrehumbert's important research program, this award will also enhance graduate education at her university, by enabling her to employ graduate students as research assistants on her project, and to purchase specialized equipment and software to keep her lab up to date with the newest developments in technology.
