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Mini-Institute Application

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The Ohio State University
2008 Linguistics Mini-Institute
July 14-18, 2008

Instructor Biographies

Quantitative methods for linguistics
Mary Beckman received her PhD in Linguistics from Cornell University and has A.B. and M.A. degrees from UC Berkeley in Oriental Languages. She was a postdoctoral researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories before joining the faculty of The Ohio State University. She has specialized for much of her career in speech production and speech perception, and more recently has been working as well in first language acquisition. She has contributed enormously to the scientific study of language and to shaping the fields of phonetics and phonology, as recognized by her election as Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America in 1993. She is also co-founder of the subfield of Laboratory Phonology, the study of sound patterns in language through experimental means. She has been instrumental in the development of undergraduate and graduate courses in quantitative methods and is collaborating with some of her graduate students in writing a textbook on the topic.

Corpus-based computational linguistics
Chris Brew is a computational linguist interested in all aspects of learning from linguistic data. He majored in Chemistry as an undergraduate, then worked for four years as a Search Examiner for the European Patent Office in Berlin. His postgraduate study was in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Sussex, where his D.Phil advisor was the speech scientist and computational linguist Steve Isard. Before coming to Ohio State, Chris was a teacher and researcher in what is now the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He was responsible for designing and creating one of the first ever courses in Data-Intensive Linguistics, and for graduate advising related to it. At OSU, he is an associate professor in both linguistics and CSE. His main academic goal is to develop and understand good ways of using linguistic intuitions to provide richer and more useful processing of very large-scale data.

Michael White (Ph.D., Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania) is an Assistant Professor in OSU's Department of Linguistics specializing in computational linguistics. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994, Dr. White began working as a Senior Computational Linguist for CoGenTex, Inc., a company that specializes in practical applications of natural language generation software. At CoGenTex, Dr. White developed the underlying technology used in all of the company's commercially deployed applications, including a system that summarizes time-series data for the visually impaired, and one that provides personalized recommendations of products such as digital cameras. After eight years at CoGenTex, he was hired as a Research Fellow of the Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems at the University of Edinburgh. While in Scotland, he worked primarily on the COMIC project (Conversational Multimodal Interactions with Computers), whose goal was to develop new multimodal interaction technologies (speech, pen, visual display, talking head) that enable intuitive interfaces to be built for complex software applications, such as design assistants. Since joining the department in 2005, Dr. White has continued to work on language generation and its interface with speech synthesis, and has been leading an effort to adapt the CCGbank for training a broad coverage surface realizer and a project on building expressive synthetic voices. Dr. White has authored and co-authored more than 30 publications in peer-reviewed journals, conference and workshop proceedings.

ToBI Labeling
Julie McGory has a PhD in Speech and Hearing Science from The Ohio State University and an M.A. degree in Applied Linguistics and TESOL from Ohio University. Her area of expertise is second language acquisition of English prosody; her dissertation was on "Acquisition of English intonation by Mandarin and Korean speakers." She is a sought-after instructor of ToBI labeling of English prosody and has also been actively involved in large-scale research projects dealing with the labeling of corpora of spontaneous and read speech for use in advancing speech technology (AT&T, Lucent Technologies, Motorola and Columbia University) or in education (National Taipei University). Dr. McGory is a full-time staff member of the Linguistics Department where she teaches courses in introductory linguistics and phonetics and oversees the Linguistics Undergraduate Program. Her primary goal is to facilitate the acquisition of useful knowledge in others and for this reason dedicates the majority of her time to developing courses that teach others how to think about and investigate language, and to advising students on how to be wise and goal-driven in their pursuit of an undergraduate degree.

Eye tracking
Kiwako Ito is a Senior Researcher in the Psycholinguistics Lab at OSU Linguistics. She has B.A. in English Education from Yokohama National University, Japan. After she obtained M.A. in Linguistics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Kiwako joined Hamamtsu School of Medicine as a visiting scholar to observe speech therapies and to learn the basics of fMRI technique for studying language function in the brain. After she retuned to UIUC, Kiwako explored thesis topics in the field of laboratory phonology under her advisor Dr. Jennifer Cole. During the graduate school, Kiwako learned speech physiology in Speech and Hearing Science Dept and was trained with psycholinguistic techniques such as ERPs and eye tracking under Dr. Susan Garnsey in Psychology Dept. Kiwako joined OSU Linguistics as a postdoctoral fellow in 2002 and started to work on an eye tracking project with Dr. Shari Speer. Currently Kiwako is working on several eye tracking projects that investigate the effect of intonation on discourse processing. She also collaborates with the Language Development Team at Riken Brain Science Institute in Japan where she conducts developmental eye tracking studies and ERP projects.

Shari Speer is a faculty member in the OSU Department of Linguistics and director of the Department's Psycholinguistics Lab. She received her PhD in Human Experimental Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin and has held research positions in the Department of Psychology in Haskins Speech Research Labs, in the Cognitive Science Program at UMass Amherst, at the Maxc-Planck Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience in Leipzig, Germany, and at the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies. Her primary research area concerns the relationship between the melody of an utterance, or its prosody, and the cognitive linguistic processes that occur as the utterance is pronounced by the speaker and understood by the listener. The principal objective is to determine how listeners recognize and use the mental representation of prosodic structure during auditory language processing. Her approach to studying prosody and spoken language processing has a cognitive science emphasis, integrating theories and methodologies across multiple disciplines, including monitoring eye movement. The work is motivated by cognitive experimental psychology approaches to human memory and language comprehension, and linguistic theories of syntax, semantics, and especially prosodic phonology, intonation and phonetics.

Methods of analysis in sociophonetic research
Robert A. Fox is a Professor in and Chair of the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at The Ohio State University. He received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1978. He is a phonetician/speech scientist interested in speech perception and speech acoustics (particularly with regard to vowels), dialect variation and second language acquisition. He has also studied behavioral aspects of speech perception such as changes in listener response as a function of human aging. He has numerous peer-reviewed publications and has received grants from NIH, DARPA/NSF, the US Department of Education, the Deafness Research Foundation, and the Advanced Telecommunications Research Foundation (Japan). He was elected a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America in 1996 and has chaired the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Ohio State since 1995. He and Dr. Ewa Jacewicz are co-directors of the Speech Perception and Acoustics Laboratories (www.spalabs.org) at Ohio State.

Ewa Jacewicz is a Research Scientist in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Ohio State. She received her PhD in Germanic Linguistics from University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2000, she came to OSU as a NIH postdoctoral Research Fellow and has maintained her full-time researcher status since then. She is a speech scientist interested in dynamic properties of speech, speech perception, sociophonetics, and second language acquisition. She has served as a principal investigator and co-investigator of several NIH-funded research grants, which have examined acoustic variation in vowel amplitude, spectral integration phenomena in speech perception, regional dialect variation in American English, and phonetic category learning in a second language. She is a co-founder and co-director of the SPA Labs.

Joseph Salmonsis Professor of German and Director of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. He holds a BA in Philosophy (UNC–Charlotte, 1978) and a PhD in Germanic Linguistics (University of Texas, 1984).  His research and teaching focus on speech sounds and language change, drawing data particularly from across the Germanic languages past and present. He is co-author of the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Germanic Languages, co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Historical Phonology, and Executive Editor of Diachronica: International journal for historical linguistics.