Mary E. Beckman

LSA 101: Acquisition of speech production

Mary E. Beckman received an A.B. and M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from Cornell University. After a stint as a postdoctoral researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories, she joined the linguistics faculty at Ohio State University in 1985. Together with John Kingston, she organized the First Conference on Laboratory Phonology in 1987. During the five years from 1990 through 1994, she promoted laboratory approaches to fundamental issues in phonology as the editor of Journal of Phonetics — e.g., by editing special issues on such themes as "Phonetic Representation", "Speech Synthesis", and "Phonetic Acquisition". An early focus of her own research was prosody and intonation. She has written two monographs on aspects of prosody in English and Japanese (Stress and Non-Stress Accent in 1986 and Japanese Tone Structure, co-authored with Janet Pierrehumbert, in 1988). Since 1994, her work has focused more on phonological acquisition; she is part of the Paidologos Project (PI: Jan Edwards) — a cross-linguistic study of phonological development.

External website: http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~mbeckman/