Janet Pierrehumbert

My current research focuses on the relationship between the dynamics of language — in acquisition, processing, or historical change — and the structure of linguistic systems. It combines experiments, statistical analyses of large corpora, and computational simulations of linguistic communities. In collaboration with colleagues at the New Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour, I am investigating the cognitive and social mechanisms that make it possible for people to have such large vocabularies, continually creating and adopting new words as they adapt to new situations. This project builds on analogies between linguistic evolution and biological evolution, and it uses crowd-sourced data in the form of on-line word games.

I am one of the founding members of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, an interdisciplinary research organisation that promotes the scientific study of all aspects of language sound structure. I am a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Linguistic Society of America, and the Cognitive Science Society. I was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019.

Racz, P., Hay, J.B. and Pierrehumbert, J.B, ‘Not all indexical cues are equal: Differential sensitivity to dimensions of indexical meaning in an artificial language’, Language Learning (2020)

Hofmann, V., Schuetze, H. and Pierrehumbert, J.B. (2020), ‘A Graph Auto-encoder model of Derivational Morphology’, Proceedings of the 58th Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Seattle WA, 5-10 July, 2020)

Hofmann, V., Pierrehumbert, J.B. and Schuetze, H. (2020), ‘Predicting the Growth of Morphological Families from Social and Linguistic Factors’, Proceedings of the 58th Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Seattle WA, 5-10 July, 2020) 

Hofmann, V., Pierrehumbert, J.B. and Schuetze, H. (2020), ‘Generating Derivational Morphology with BERT’, (arXiv preprint, 2020)

Todd, S., Pierrehumbert, J.B., and Hay, J.B., ‘Word frequency effects in sound change as a consequence of perceptual asymmetries: An exemplar-based model’, Cognition 185 (2019), 1-20

Needle, J. and Pierrehumbert, J.B., ‘Gendered Associations of English Morphology’, in Harrington, Pouplier, and Reinisch (eds), special issue on Abstraction, Diversity and Speech Dynamics (2018), Laboratory Phonology

Pierrehumbert, J.B. and Granell, R., ‘On hapax legomena and morphological productivity’, Sigmorphon (Brussels, 31 Oct 2018)

Schumacher, R.A. and Pierrehumbert, J.B., ‘Prior Expectations in Linguistic Learning: A Stochastic Model of Individual Differences’, Proceedings of the 39th Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2017), July 2017, London

Beckner, C., Pierrehumbert, J.B. and Hay, J.B., ‘The emergence of linguistic structure in an on-line iterated learning task’, Journal of Language Evolution (2017)

Racz, P., Hay, J.B. and Pierrehumbert, J.B., ‘Social Salience Discriminates Learnability of Contextual Cues in an Artificial Language’, Frontiers in Psychology (2017) (8)

Racz, P., Hay, J.B., Needle, J., King, J. and Pierrehumbert, J.B., ‘Gradient Maori Phonotactics’, Te Reo (2016) 59, 3-21 

Pierrehumbert, J.B., ‘Beyond abstract versus episodic’, Annual Review of Linguistics (2016) 2, 33-52 

Clopper, C., Tamati, T.N. and Pierrehumbert, J. B., ‘Variation in the strength of lexical encoding across dialects’, J. Phonetics (2016) 58, 87-103

He, Y., Baumann, P., Fang, H., Hutchinson, B., Jaech, A., Ostendorf, M., Fosler-Lussier, E., and Pierrehumbert, J.B., ‘Using Pronunciation-Based Morphological Subword Units to Improve OOV Handling in Keyword Search’, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (2016) 24(1), 79-92 

Munson, B., Crocker, L., Pierrehumbert, J.B., Owen-Anderson, A. and Zucker, K.J., ‘Gender typicality in children’s speech: A comparison of boys with and without gender identity disorder’, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. (2015) 137 Preprint version 

Fang, H., Ostendorf, M., Baumann, P., and Pierrehumbert, J.B., ‘Exponential language learning using morphological features and multitask learning’, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (2015) 23(12), 2410-2421

Hay, J.B., Pierrehumbert, J.B., Walker, A. J. and LaShell, P., ‘Tracking word frequency effects through 130 years of sound change’, Cognition (2015) 139, 83-91

Daland, R. and J. B. Pierrehumbert, ‘Learnability of diphone-based segmentation’, Cognitive Science (2011) 35(1), 119-155

E.G. Altmann, J.B. Pierrehumbert, and A.E. Motter, ‘Beyond word frequency: Bursts, lulls, and scaling in the temporal distributions of words’, PLoS One (2009) 4(11), e7678

Pierrehumbert, J.B., ‘Word-specific phonetics’, Laboratory Phonology VII (2002) Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 101-139

Pierrehumbert, J.B. and J. Hirschberg, ‘The Meaning of Intonational contours in the Interpretation of Discourse’, in P. Cohen, J. Morgan, and M. Pollack, (eds), Intentions in Communication (MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1990) 271-311