Patrice Speeter Beddor

Patrice (Pam) Beddor, John C. Catford Collegiate Professor of Linguistics, studies the relation between the cognitive and physical aspects of sound structures. She investigates how speakers convey, and listeners process, linguistic information, with a particular focus on the information conveyed by overlapping or coarticulated speech gestures. In one line of collaborative work she studies listeners' moment-by-moment use of coarticulatory information as it unfolds in real time. As part of this inquiry, she explores whether the time course of a listener's perception of coarticulation is linked to that individual's own production patterns. Her study of the relation between a language user's perception and production, and the complex factors that influence that relation, is motivated in part by an interest in the initiation of certain patterns of sound change. An overarching goal of this research program is to inform a more comprehensive model of the production-perception relation for coarticulated speech. In a separate line of study, she investigates, in collaboration with several graduate students, the time course of listeners' use and integration of both social and linguistic information as they make perceptual decisions.

Pam Beddor teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in phonetics (articulation, acoustics, speech perception, speech science, the phonetics of sound change) as well as the gateway course Introduction to Linguistic Analysis. In the past several years she has chaired or co-chaired the doctoral committees of Susan Lin (Production and perception of prosodically varying inter-gestural timing in American English laterals; now at the University of California, Berkeley), Kevin McGowan (Listener expectations and the processing of foreign-accented speech; now at the University of Kentucky), Jon Yip (Phonetic effects on the timing of gestural coordination in Modern Greek consonant clusters; now at the University of Hong Kong), and Harim Kwon (Perceptually driven changes in bilingual speakers' production of L1 and L2; now at George Mason University). In recent years she has also supervised undergraduate honors theses in speech perception.

She is an elected member of the International Phonetic Association Permanent Council. Previously on the College of LSA's task force to develop an undergraduate major in cognitive science, she is now a member of the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science Executive Committee. She was formerly department chair and editor of the Journal of Phonetics.

Field(s) of Study

• Phonetics
• Speech perception-production relation
• Phonetics-phonology relation
• Sound change