People
“Dear Friends,
I am writing to tell you that Cathe Browman died today, July 18, after what most of you know was a long, long illness. She died at home, very peacefully, and I was with her. As many of you also know, Cathe loved Haskins and was deeply committed to helping it continue to be the unique, intellectually creative and nourishing place that it is. I have had occasion over the last couple of months to assure her that Haskins continues to be that place.
There will be no formal funeral or memorial service. Diamandis Gafos and I have over the last month begun to plan an Articulatory Phonology conference in her honor/memory on the Greek island of Chios, in summer of 2010. Those wishing to make a gesture of remembrance can make a contribution to the CT Chapter of the National MS Society or to the Cathe Browman Fund for Exploration at Haskins Laboratories.
Louis Goldstein”
Catherine Phebe Browman was an American linguist and speech scientist. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1978. 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). 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.
Education
Ph.D. (Linguistics), University of California, Los Angeles, 1978
B. A. (Mathematics), University of Montana, 1967
Selected Publications
Browman, Catherine P.: Rules for demisyllable synthesis using LINGUA, a language interpreter. In: Proc. IEEE, ICASSP'80. New York : IEEE, 1980, S. 561–564
Browman, C. P., Goldstein, L., Kelso, J. A. S., Rubin, P. E., & Saltzman, E. (1984). Articulatory synthesis from underlying dynamics. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 75, S22.
Browman, C. P., & Goldstein, L. M. (1986). Towards an articulatory phonology. Phonology Yearbook, 3, 219–252.
Browman, C. P. (1986). The Hunting of the Quark: The Particle in English. Language and Speech, Vol. 29, Part 4, 311–334.
Browman, C. P., & Goldstein, L. (1990). Gestural specification using dynamically-defined articulatory structures. Journal of Phonetics, 18, 299–320.
Browman, C. P.,& Goldstein, L. (1991). Tiers in articulatory phonology, with some implications for casual speech. In J. Kingston and M. E. Beckman (eds), Papers in Laboratory Phonology I: Between the Grammar and the Physics of Speech. Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge University Press. (pp. 341–376).
Browman, C. P., & Goldstein, L. (1992). Articulatory Phonology: An Overview. Phonetica, 49, 155–180.
Browman, C.P. & Goldstein, L. (2000). Competing constraints on intergestural coordination and self-organization of phonological structures. Bulletin de la Communication Parlée, no. 5, p. 25–34.
Goldstein, L., & Browman, C. P. (1986) Representation of voicing contrasts using articulatory gestures. Journal of Phonetics, 14, 339–342.
Saltzman, E., Rubin, P. E., Goldstein, L., & Browman, C. P. (1987). Task-dynamic modeling of interarticulator coordination. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 82, S15.
Obituary. [PDF]