Catherine Browman
Catherine Phebe Browman was an American linguist and speech scientist. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1978. Browman was a research scientist at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. While at Bell Laboratories, she was known for her work on speech synthesis using demisyllables. She later worked as researcher at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut. She was best known for developing, with Louis Goldstein, of the theory of articulatory phonology, a gesture-based approach to phonological and phonetic structure. The theoretical approach is incorporated in a computational model that generates speech from a gesturally specified lexicon. Browman was made an honorary member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.
Life and career
Early life and family
Catherine Browman was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1945. Her father, Ludwig Browman, worked on the faculty as a zoologist for the University of Montana, and her mother, Audra Browman, held a Ph.D. in biochemistry and worked as a historian in the Missoula area. Browman was the youngest of four siblings. She had two older brothers, Andrew and David Browman, as well as an older sister, Audra Adelberger.Higher education and career
Browman received a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics from the University of Montana. After graduating in 1967, she moved to New Jersey and worked as a programmer for Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill. Shortly after, she began working as an Associate Member of Technical Staff in the Acoustic Research Department at Bell Telephone Laboratories where she contributed to the creation of "the first Bell Laboratories text-to-speech system". The software was demonstrated at the 1972 International Conference of Speech Communication and Processing in Boston. Browman’s work in the Acoustic Research Department motivated her to return to higher education. In 1972, Browman enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles. She studied under Peter Ladefoged and worked in a phonetics lab alongside Victoria Fromkin and others.Dissertation
Browman’s dissertation, titled "Tip of the Tongue and Slip of the Ear: Implications for Language Processing", analyzed and compared the lexical retrieval errors and the perceptual errors that occur during casual conversation. The dissertation is divided into four chapters.The first chapter provides a general description of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon; Browman analyzes the role of unit size, within-unit position, and stress in this phenomenon. She points out that, whereas the first consonant in a word is recalled mostly on its own, the last consonant in a stressed syllable is usually recalled with the preceding vowel. The second chapter covers a general description of “slip of the ear” data and analyzes perceptual errors. Browman discusses how the majority of perceptual errors occur within a word, and further that there is a tendency to perceive words as shorter than they actually are.
The third chapter carries on to investigate perceptual errors within the word. Here, Browman cites two sources of perceptual errors: low-level acoustic misanalysis and interference from higher lexical levels. The final chapter compares lexical and perceptual errors to each other and to the information in the acoustic signal. Browman notes a common mechanism to both errors, namely, a mechanism that focuses attention on the beginning and end of a word and the initial portion of the stressed syllable.
Career post-Ph.D.
Browman graduated with a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1978 after defending her dissertation on language processing. After graduating, Browman returned to Bell Telephone Laboratories to work as a postdoc with Osamu Fujimura. The two developed “Lingua”, a new demi-syllable based speech-to-text system.Browman taught in the at New York University from 1982-1984. Upon leaving NYU, she was replaced by Noriko Umeda, whom Browman had worked with at Bell Laboratories prior to graduate school. Later that same year, Browman began her career at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut where she would develop Articulatory Phonology, her most significant contribution to the field of linguistics.
Life outside linguistics
Browman enjoyed hiking in her home state of Montana, as well as the Southwest of the United States. In addition to outdoor adventures, she enjoyed dance. Starting in the late 1980s, Browman taught “Dances of Universal Peace” in both New Jersey and Connecticut.Later life
In 1987, Browman was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She gave her final public talk at the 1993 Laboratory Phonology Meeting held in Oxford, England. Two years later, she lost her ability to walk, but, determined to continue advancing her ideas, continued to work from home on grant proposals until her death on July 18, 2008. Although no official memorial was held, an unofficial celebration of her work took place during an articulatory phonology conference at the Asilomar Conference Center in Monterey, California, in 2019.Major accomplishments
Articulatory phonology
Browman's most cited contribution to the field of linguistics is in the subfield of phonology. Along with her research partner, Louis M. Goldstein, she proposed the theory of articulatory phonology early on in her research at Haskins Laboratory. Articulatory phonology creates phonological representations by describing utterances as patterns of overlapping gestures by the oral articulators. These gestural units account for both spatial and temporal properties of speech and reflect the movement of the articulators. For example, the gesture involved in producing includes closing the lips and spreading the glottis. This differs from previous phonological theories which captured linguistically significant aspects in speech as non-overlapping sequences of segmental units built from features. Articulatory phonology allows for overlapping gestures and temporal relations between articulators to be included in the phonological representation. Articulatory phonology further posits that gestures are “prelinguistic units of action” that are harnessed for phonological structuring, suggesting a theory of phonological development.Gestures
Gestures are the most basic unit of articulatory phonology, and are defined in terms of Elliot Saltzman’s task dynamics. These were instantiated in a gestural-computational model at Haskins Laboratories that combines articulatory phonology and task dynamics with the articulatory synthesis system developed by Philip Rubin, Paul Mermelstein, and colleagues. In order to visualize what an utterance looks like, this model uses mathematics that describe damped mass-spring movements to characterize the articulators’ trajectories. According to Browman, two important features of gestures are specified using this model. Firstly, gestures are speech tasks that represent the formation and release of oral constrictions, an action that usually involves the motion of multiple articulators. Secondly, gestures are defined by their characteristic motions through space and over time.Speech tasks are further specified by tract variables. There are eight tract variables in Articulatory Phonology: lip protrusion, lip aperture, tongue tip constriction location, tongue tip constriction degree, tongue bodied constriction location, tongue body constriction degree, velic aperture, and glottal aperture. These tract variables have several values and specify the location of the constriction and the extent of the constriction of an oral articulator. Constriction degree values include: closed, critical, narrow, mid, and wide; constriction location values include: protruded, labial, dental, alveolar, postalveolar, palatal, velar, uvular, and pharyngeal. For example, consists of the gestures "GLO wide" and "TT alveolar closed".
Gestures are also units of phonological contrast, and so if two lexical items differ by the presence or absence of a gesture, parameter difference among gestures, or the organization of gestures, the items can be said to contrast. Parameters, in this case, refer to constriction location, stiffness, and dampening. Contrasts can be seen in gestural scores. As an example, Browman illustrates that ‘add’ and ‘had’ differ by only a glottal gesture. She also explains that, whereas ‘had’ and ‘add’ previously would have been analyzed as differing by the absence of a segment and ‘bad’ and ‘pad’ by a single feature., the use of gestures conveys both contrasts by the presence or absence of gesture, simplifying the analysis.