Catherine Browman

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.

Browman received a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics from the University of Montana.

Browman was a research scientist at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey (1967–1972).

While at Bell Laboratories, she was known for her work on speech synthesis using demisyllables (a half syllable unit, divided at the center of the syllable nucleus).

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.

Browman’s dissertation, titled "Tip of the Tongue and Slip of the Ear: Implications for Language Processing", analyzed and compared the lexical retrieval errors (the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon) and the perceptual errors (“slips of the ear”) 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 (full syllable, sub-syllable, consonant cluster, etc.), 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.

She received her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1978.

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.

Starting in the late 1980s, Browman taught “Dances of Universal Peace” in both New Jersey and Connecticut.

She later worked as researcher at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut (1982–1998).

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.

Browman taught in the Linguistics Department 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.

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.

In 1987, Browman was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

She gave her final public talk at the 1993 Laboratory Phonology Meeting held in Oxford, England.

Catherine Phebe Browman ([ˈkæθrɪn ˈfibi ˈbraʊ̯mən]; 1945–18 July 2008 ) was an American linguist and speech scientist.