FAW: Experimental and Computational Studies of Word Phonology

Janet Pierrehumbert博士将利用美国国家科学基金会（NSF）女性教师奖项目的资助，继续研究语音学和音韵学之间的关键接口，以及语音的物理特性和抽象心理表征之间的接口。她的近期研究重点将放在单词在句子中产生的语音上，特别关注音节邻接的限制以及句子级语调轮廓与单词结构和语音的相互作用。先前的研究（Pierrehumbert博士对此做出了重要贡献）使我们对音节的语音和语音特征以及句子级别的韵律轮廓有了相当牢固的理解。单词级别是这两个系统相互作用的地方，到目前为止，我们只有粗略的、诱人的证据来说明适用的约束和模式。本文的研究计划是实证地确定这些制约因素，然后建立英语构词法的语音和音系理论模型。该模型有望促进我们对语音学和音位学之间关系的理解，这是语言科学中最基本的问题之一。它还将在语音识别和语音合成等技术中有潜在的应用。除了进一步推进Pierrehumbert博士的重要研究项目外，该奖项还将加强她所在大学的研究生教育，使她能够雇用研究生作为她项目的研究助理，并购买专门的设备和软件，使她的实验室跟上技术的最新发展。

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.