25 Facts About Catherine Browman

Catherine Phebe Browman was an American linguist and speech scientist.

Catherine Browman later worked as researcher at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut.

Catherine Browman was best known for developing, with Louis Goldstein, of the theory of articulatory phonology, a gesture-based approach to phonological and phonetic structure.

Catherine Browman was made an honorary member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.

Catherine Browman had two older brothers, Andrew and David Browman, as well as an older sister, Audra Adelberger.

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

In 1972, Catherine Browman enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Catherine Browman studied under Peter Ladefoged and worked in a phonetics lab alongside Victoria Fromkin and others.

Catherine 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.

Catherine 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.

Later that same year, Catherine 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.

Catherine Browman enjoyed hiking in her home state of Montana, as well as the Southwest of the United States.

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

Catherine Browman's most cited contribution to the field of linguistics is in the subfield of phonology.

Catherine Browman 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.

Catherine Browman compared English words containing different numbers of consonants in their onsets.

Catherine Browman found that as more consonants are added, the timing of the whole onset cluster is adjusted.

Catherine Browman notes that the timing of the onset can be defined by averaging the center of each onset consonant to produce one center for the whole consonant cluster, which she denotes this a c-center.

Catherine Browman compared English words containing different numbers of consonants in their codas.

Catherine Browman found that the first consonant in the coda has a constant timing relationship with the preceding vowel, which is not affected by the addition of more consonants to the coda.

Catherine Browman's paper looks at data from the Tokyo X-ray archive produced by a speaker of American English.

Hall notes that most phonological models analyze these changes with phonological rules that apply at certain rates of speech, while Catherine Browman's theory explains these alterations as resulting from a reduction of gestures or an increase of their overlap.

Catherine Browman took the latter positions as she believes that the articulatory gesture is the single basic unit for both phonological and phonetic representations.

Catherine Browman's basic unit, the articulatory gesture, is an abstract description of the articulatory events occurring in the vocal tract during speech.

Catherine Browman believes that, in defining phonological units using these gestures, researchers can provide a set of articulatory-based natural classes, specify core aspects of phonological structure in particular languages, and account for phonological variations.