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In June, 2005, I completed a Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Washington. My dissertation, Situation-Based Intonation Pattern Distribution in a Corpus of American English, investigated whether intonation could be found to systematically vary with speech register (situational factors). Register effects were found for all hypothesized intonational measures, which were expressed as distributions of tone events and patterns. I anticipate that my work can be used to improve the naturalness and contextual appropriateness of text-to-speech synthesis, the robustness of automatic speech recognition, and the user-friendliness of dialog systems. It also augments existing sociolinguistic literature with respect to the ways in which registers manifest in spoken language. My M.A. research focused on the relationship between the acoustic/phonetic production and perception of foreign accented speech. My Ph.C. papers dealt with intonation modeling and the acquisition of suprasegmental phonology. As an academic goal, I hope to contribute measurably to the body of knowledge about the function and behavior of intonation in speech.
As a career goal, I plan to contribute to the radical improvement and implementation of speech, language, and information technologies, using superior phonetic and phonological methodology to create effective speech systems and integrate them into devices that improve people's lives. I enjoy collaborative research and working with people who are excited about what they do.
During most of my years in graduate school, I worked at the University of Washington's Language Learning Center(LLC), serving the Linguistics, Romance Languages and Scandinavian Languages departments. The LLC provides language learners with on-site and online access to multimedia language materials. I've studied Spanish, Russian and Mandarin to broaden my understanding of the world's languages and to expand my knowledge of intonation as both a lexical and phrasal phenomenon.
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