History of Phonetics at Ohio State

by Ilse Lehiste, with assistance from
Mary Beckman, Robert A. Fox, and Keith Johnson
Ohio State University

INTRODUCTION

The history of phonetics at OSU extends through four academic generations: from RUSSELL to BLACK to LEHISTE to Fox, Beckman and Johnson--or, in other words, from the study of primarily English articulation to the practical application of speech science to speech correction, elocution, and even rhetoric, to linguistics-oriented experimental study of the phonetic structure of various languages, to experimental phonology. These four stages will be described below in some detail.

EPOCH 1

G. Oscar Russell joined the faculty of OSU as an Assistant Professor of Spanish in 1925. In 1928, he completed his doctorate at Columbia University and published his famous book The Vowel. The early X-ray study of speech articulation sought to highlight individual differences in speech production by studying vowel articulations under changes in head and neck posture. Also in 1928, Raymond Herbert STETSON at Oberlin College published his Motor Phonetics, based on experimental work which he carried out in his self-made (and appropriately named) "Oscillograph Laboratory". These two enterprising pioneers of American phonetics set the tone at the university for over a decade, and OSU phonetics starting from this time was characterized by a focus on instrumental-experimental studies of the physiology of speaking. When the Department of Speech was established in 1936 Russell became the director of its phonetics laboratory, which he headed until 1941.

A more traditional approach to phonetics was likewise well represented in Ohio and at Ohio State. For example, J.S. KENYON (Hiram College), described by BRONSTEIN et al. (1977, p. 13) as the 'dean' of American phonetics in the 1920s, had published his American Pronunciation in 1924. Ohio State was home at this time (1921-27) to LEONARD BLOOMFIELD, who published his Menomini Texts in 1928. Hans Kurath was professor at Ohio State 1927-32; his Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada appeared in 1931. Several students trained at OSU during this period went on to influential careers. For example, Orvis C. Irwin, who received his PhD degree in 1929, went on to serve on the faculty of the University of Iowa for thirty years. Bert Emsley, likewise receiving his PhD in 1929, taught at OSU until 1959, also thirty years.

A strong emphasis on instrumental phonetics has continued at OSU to the present day, both at the Department of Speech and Hearing Science, and since 1965 in a parallel stream at the Department of Linguistics.

EPOCH 2

The second epoch in OSU phonetics began in 1947, when Henry Michael Moser joined the OSU faculty. Perhaps not as well known as the earlier Ohio phoneticians, Moser was a program builder who served as the director of the OSU Speech and Hearing Clinic starting in 1948. He was also evidently partly responsible for bringing JOHN W. BLACK to OSU from nearby Kenyon College (1949). Black has been described as one of the eminent phoneticians of the modern century (BRONSTEIN et al., 1977, p. 15). He was instrumental in establishing speech science as an academic discipline at Ohio State and in the nation. Among Black's important publications are the books Speech: Code, Meaning, and Communication(1955) (with Wilbur E. Moore); Phonation and Phonology (1969) (with Ruth B. Irwin); and Lectures in Speech Sciences (1976).

This period in the history of phonetics at OSU saw the development of speech science and clinical speech pathology as disciplines of study. As with the earlier instrumental phonetics tradition, this clinical speech science strand of history has continued to the present at OSU in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science.

EPOCH 3

This epoch in the history of phonetics at OSU began in 1963, when ILSE LEHISTE started her long and productive tenure at Ohio State. Lehiste came to OSU from the University of Michigan, where she received her PhD in Linguistics in 1959 and was a Research Associate at the Communication Sciences Laboratory 1959-63. At Ohio State, she divided her time between phonetics, historical linguistics, and administration, serving as Chairman 1965-71, Acting Chairman 1984-85, Chairman 1985-87, and Professor Emeritus since 1987. She established the phonetics laboratory associated with the Department of Linguistics, then equipped primarily for research in acoustic phonetics.

Her research areas included the study of boundary signals, the phonetic realization of syntactic structure, and the description of units of speech production and perception. Much of her research dealt with the prosodic structure of numerous languages: an early summary appeared as the book Suprasegmentals (1970) (cf. also, for example, LEHISTE, 1997a). Her more recent projects deal with the phonetic realization of metrical structure in orally produced poetry. The languages to whcih she has devoted considerable attention are Estonian (Lehiste, 1997b; I. Lehiste and J. Ross (Eds.), Estonian Prosody: Papers from a Symposium, 1997; and Serbocroatian (I. Lehiste and P. Ivic, Word and Sentence Prosody in Serbocroatian, 1986). Lehiste has also worked in the areas of historical linguistics (Principles and Methods for Historical Linguistics (with Robert Jeffers), 1979) and language contact (Lectures on Language Contact, 1988).

Research by graduate students during that time culminated in eight dissertations directed by LEHISTE:

1970-71: Zinny Bond, Units of Speech Perception;
1973-74: Linda R. Shockey, Phonetic and Phonological Properties of Connected Speech;
1973-74: Sara S. Garnes, Quantity in Icelandic Production and Perception;
1976-77: John Perkins, An Acoustic-Phonetic Study of Cross-Dialect Borrowing;
1976-77: Holly Semiloff, An Acoustic Correlate of Syllabicity in English;
1976-77: Robert K. Herbert, Language Universals, Markedness Theory and Natural Phonetic Processes: The Interaction of Nasal and Oral Consonants;
1981-82: Christopher Farrar, A Prototype Model of Speech Perception;
1981-82: Rachel Schaffer, Vocal Cues for Irony in English;
1982-83: Deborah Schaffer, Intonation Cues to Management in Natural Conversation.

The dissertations of Bond and Shockey were published in the Working Papers in Linguistics series established by the department (of which fifty issues have appeared 1967-97). The dissertation of Garnes was published in Hamburger Phonetische Beitraege Bd. 18, Hamburg: Buske (1976), and the dissertation of Herbert in Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 25, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter (1986).

EPOCH 4

All of the approaches to phonetics found in the history of the institution extend to the present day at OSU, and in many ways are more vibrant than ever. The fourth and latest epoch started with the appointments of Robert A. Fox in Speech and Hearing Science in 1984 and Mary E. Beckman in Linguistics in 1985, followed in 1993 by the appointments of Keith Johnson in Linguistics and Marios Fourakis and Jan Edwards in Speech and Hearing Science.

Robert A. Fox received his MA and PhD degrees in Linguistics in 1978 from the University of Chicago, and was a member of the OSU linguistics faculty before moving to the Department of Speech and Hearing Science. He is presently Chairman of the Speech and Hearing Science Department. His current research is concerned with the perceptual magnet effect, particularly for the "corner" vowels [u] and [a] (all of the work so far as been using the [i]-[I] continuum) (Fox, R.A. and Carahaly, L. (1998), "Perceptual magnet effects in the corner vowels /u/ and /a/"). Recent work includes also investigation of scaling (Fox, R.A., Flege, J.E. and M.J. Munro (1995), "The perception of English and Spanish vowels by native English and Spanish listeners"). Fox also has a long-standing interest in the effects of aging on perception (Fox, R.A., Wall, L.G. and J. Gokeen, (1992), "Age- related changes in the perception of dynamic phonetic information").

Fox is also Principal Investigator of an NIH Training Grant, entitled "Multidisciplinary Program in Speech and Hearing Science." Co-investigators include Professors Feth (Speech and Hearing Science), Weisenberger (SHS), Krishnamurty (Electrical Engineering), Beckman (Linguistics), Mari Jones (Psychology), Johnson (Linguistics), and Fourakis (SHS). This project represents an interdisciplinary program to train predoctoral graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to pursue research in the area of speech and hearing science.

Linguistically-oriented courses taught by Fox include Principles of Phonetics, Language Development, Speech Science, Articulation, Acoustic Phonetics, Experimental Phonetics, and Computer Use in Speech and Hearing. Of phonetics-oriented dissertations directed by Fox, the following may be mentioned:

1989: Ying-Yong Qi, Acoustic Features of Nasal Consonants. Ying-Yong Qi was the recipient of the first joint ASA-ASHA KLATT award;
1994: Ho-Hsien Pan, The Acquisition of Taiwanese (Amoy) Initial Stops;
1997: Julia McGory, Acquisition of Intonational Prominence in English by Seoul Korean and Mandarin Chinese Speakers.

Mary E. Beckman has an MA degree in Oriental Languages from the University of California at Berkeley (1976), and MA and PhD degrees in linguistics from Cornell (1982 and 1984). Beckman has expanded and diversified the phonetics offerings and has brought the laboratory up to date. She is co-founder (with John Kingston) of the Laboratory Phonology conference series and associated biannual collections of Papers in Laboratory Phonology. During the five years from 1990 through 1994, she also promoted laboratory approaches to fundamental issues in phonology as the editor of Journal of Phonetics (see, for example, the 1990 special issue on the theme of "Phonetic Representation"). Much of her own research focuses on prosody in all its aspects, from modeling the details of various phonetic correlates to developing computationally tractable phonological representations of stress and phrasing. She has published two monographs on aspects of prosody in English and Japanese: Stress and Non-Stress Accent (1986) and (with Janet Pierrehumbert) Japanese Tone Structure (1988), and has developed several experimental paradigms for investigating articulatory and physiological representations of prosodic structure and timing. She has also done experimental work in first and second language phonological acquisition. (Some examples of recent research topics: "Speech Models and Speech Synthesis" (1997), and "A typology of spontaneous speech" (1997)).

Up to now, Beckman has directed six dissertations:

1988: Keith A. Johnson, Processes of Speaker Normalization in Vowel Perception.
1991: Kenneth J. de Jong, The Oral Articulation of English Stress Accent.
1993: Sun-Ah Jun, The Phonetics and Phonology of Korean Prosody.
1994: Sook-hyang Lee, The Role of the Jaw in Consonant Articulation.
1996: Shu-hui Peng, Phonetic Implementation and Perception of Segmental Coarticulation and Tone Sandhi.
1996: Gayle Ayers, Nuclear Accent Types and Prominence: Some Psycholinguistic Experiments.

Keith A. Johnson earned his MA and PhD in Linguistics at OSU (1985 and 1988), returned to the department in 1993, after post- doctoral research fellowships at Indiana University with David Pisoni and UCLA with PAT KEATING and PETER LADEFOGED. Johnson also taught at UCLA and at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, prior to returning to OSU.

Johnson's research is focussed on processes of speaker normalization in speech perception. His 1988 OSU dissertation Processes of Speaker Noramlization in Vowel Perception was directed by Mary Beckman, Robert Fox, ILSE LEHISTE, and Neal Johnson. His research has resulted in several published articles (Johnson, 1989; 1990a; 1990b; 1991; 1997) an edited volume (Johnson and Mullenix, 1997), as well as articles on speech perception in general (Johnson and Ralston, 1994; Johnson, Flemming and Wright, 1993) and on individual differences in speech production (Johnson, LADEFOGED and Lindau, 1993). Johnson has also published a textbook, Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics (1997), which has been adopted at several universities in the U.S.

His recent research with Elizabeth Strand (Strand and Johnson, 1996; Johnson and Strand, 1998) takes a sociophonetic approach to the role of talker differences in speech perception. (The sociophonetic approach is being developed in collaboration with Professor Norma Mendoza-Denton from the Department of Spanish and Portugese.)

Jan Edwards received her M.S. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Linguistics in 1981, and her PhD degree from the CUNY Graduate Center in 1985 in Speech Science. Her current research deals with phonological development and disorder, and specific language impairment. Linguistically oriented courses taught by Edwards include Language Acquisition and Phonological Disorders.

Marios Fourakis received his PhD degree in Linguistics from Indiana University in 1983. His research areas include speech production by deaf children and by person with motor speech disorders, speech perception by persons with cochlear implants, and speech production. Fourakis teaches courses in Undergraduate Speech Science, Advanced Speech Science, Acoustic Phonetics, and Neurology of the Speech and Hearing Mechanism.

PHONETICS IN OTHER DEPARTMENTS AT OHIO STATE

Lively and friendly exchanges of ideas characterize the frequent interactions of phoneticians on the faculty of OSU. Several other faculty members (some of whom have already been listed in connection with the NIH training grant) deserve special mention: in Speech and Hearing Science there are Professors Larry Feth (a specialist in auditory signal processing) and OSAMU FUJIMURA (the developer of the original x-ray microbeam and of many ideas such as "demisyllable synthesis"); in Psychology there are Professors Neal Johnson and Mark Pitt (both psycholinguists); and in Electrical Engineering there is Professor Ashok Krishnamurty (a specialist in speech signal processing). Each of these faculty members has a well-equipped laboratory that complements the facilities in the Linguistics Laboratory. Strong interactions among the faculty also allow pooling of resources, such as site licenses for some software and shared purchasing of some expensive equipment.

The Department of Speech and Hearing Science also offers several phonetics courses every year, which complement the offerings in the Department of Linguistics.