Jacqueline Vaissière (born 24 August 1946 in Mont-Saint-Martin, France) is a French

phonetician Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

Career

Vaissière studied computing and automatic language translation under the supervision of Bernard Vauquois, at Centre d’Études et de Traduction Automatique,

University of Grenoble The (, ''Grenoble Alps University'', abbr. UGA) is a Grands établissements, ''grand établissement'' in Grenoble, France. Founded in 1339, it is the third largest university in France with about 60,000 students and over 3,000 researchers. Es ...

, where she earned her PhD in 1971. She joined the Speech Communication Group at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

(headed by Pr. Ken Stevens), where she acquired a specialization in acoustic phonetics. When the speech processing community moved towards

black box In science, computing, and engineering, a black box is a system which can be viewed in terms of its inputs and outputs (or transfer characteristics), without any knowledge of its internal workings. Its implementation is "opaque" (black). The te ...

models for recognition and synthesis, Jacqueline Vaissière left the

Centre National d'études des Télécommunications The Centre national d'études des télécommunications (French language acronym CNET, ''national center for telecommunication studies'' in English) was a French national research centre in telecommunications. It was created on May 4, 1944 as a Fren ...

and chose to become a professor at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, where she succeeded René Gsell in 1990. Together with Annie Rialland, Jacqueline Vaissière headed the Phonetics and Phonology Laboratory at Paris 3/

CNRS The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 eng ...

: Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie until 2013. From 2011–2014 she coordinated the 10-year project
Laboratoire d’Excellence
" Empirical Foundations of Linguistics." In 2010, she was elected "Membre de L'

Institut Universitaire de France The Institut Universitaire de France (IUF, Academic Institute of France), is a service of the French Ministry of Higher Education that annually distinguishes a small number of university professors for their research excellence, as evidenced by t ...

Distinctions

Vaissière was awarded the

CNRS Silver Medal The CNRS Silver Medal is a scientific award given every year to about fifteen researchers by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). It is awarded to a researcher for "the originality, quality and importance of their work, re ...

in 2009, at the joint suggestion of its Human and Social Sciences department (InSHS) and its computing/engineering department (InS2I).

Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur The National Order of the Legion of Honour ( ), formerly the Imperial Order of the Legion of Honour (), is the highest and most prestigious French national order of merit, both military and Civil society, civil. Currently consisting of five cl ...

(2011)
Officiel de l'Ordre National du Mérite
(2015)
Who's who?
since 2010 She was elected as ISCA fellow in 2014: "For her pioneering works in clinical phonetics and her immense role at the interface between

phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

phonology Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...

and speech engineering".

Selected publications

* Vaissière, Jacqueline. 1971. Contribution à la synthèse par règles du français. PhD dissertation. Grenoble. * Vaissière, Jacqueline. 1975. Further note on French prosody. Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT, Quarterly Progress Report 115. 251–262. * Vaissière, Jacqueline. 1983. Language-independent prosodic features. In Anne Cutler & Robert Ladd (eds.), Prosody: Models and Measurements, 53–66. Berlin: Springer Verlag. * Vaissière, Jacqueline. 1985. The use of prosodic parameters in automatic speech recognition. Computer, Speech and language. Prentice-Hall International. * Vaissière, Jacqueline. 1986. Variance and Invariance at the Word Level. In Joseph S. Perkell & Dennis Klatt (eds.), Invariance and Variability in Speech Process, 534–539. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. * Vaissière, Jacqueline. 1988. Prediction of velum movement from phonological specifications. Phonetica 45. 122–139. * Vaissière, Jacqueline. 1995. Phonetic explanations for cross-linguistic similarities. Phonetica 52. 123–130. * Vaissière, Jacqueline. 2004. The Perception of Intonation. In David B. Pisoni & Robert E. Remez (eds.), Handbook of Speech Perception, 236–263. (Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics). Oxford, U.K. & Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell. * Vaissière, Jacqueline. 2006
La Phonétique
Presses Universitaires de France (translated in Japanese and Arabic))

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Vaissiere, Jacqueline Linguists from France Academic staff of the University of Paris Grenoble Alpes University alumni Living people Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty French women linguists 1946 births