LSA 2009

Richard Wright received his B.A. in French with an African Studies certificate from Michigan State University in 1986. From 1987 to 1988 he volunteered in the Peace Corps where he taught English and Biology at a small secondary school in Takaungu, Kenya. After the Peace Corps he traveled and briefly taught English in Taiwan. From 199-1996 he was a graduate student in Linguistics at UCLA. Patricia Keating was his advisor for both his M.A. in 1993 and his Ph.D. in 1996. The M.A. concerned speech perception and cue weighting and the Ph.D. concerned the role of perception in consonant cluster organization and examined clusters in the Tsou language. From 1996-98 he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Speech Research Laboratory in the Psychology Department at Indiana University where his advisor was David Pisoni. In 1998 he joined the Linguistics Department at the University of Washington where he regularly teaches courses on introductory phonetics, experimental and acoustic phonetics, and seminars on a variety of topics mostly to do with speech perception and acoustic phonetics. His main research areas are: articulatory and acoustic phonetics, speech perception, sources of variability in spoken language, and the acoustic phonetic description of Austronesian and East African languages. He has received research funding from a variety of public and private sources including the NSF and the NIH and has published articles in several books and journals including The Journal of the Acousical Society of America, Journal of Phonetics, Journal of the International Phonetic Association, and Language.