Mary Esther Beckman (born September 1953) is a Professor Emerita of

Linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingu ...

at the

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best pu ...

Career

Beckman received her PhD from

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to ...

in 1984. She was a Postdoctoral member of the technical staff in "Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence Research" at AT&T

Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mul ...

, Murray Hill, NJ, before joining the linguistics faculty at

in 1985. She has directed at least twenty-five PhD dissertations to completion at

. Her early research focused on prosody and the development of the Tones and Boundary Indexes (

ToBI ToBI (; an abbreviation of tones and break indices) is a set of conventions for transcribing and annotating the prosody of speech. The term "ToBI" is sometimes used to refer to the conventions used for describing American English specifically, whic ...

) system of intonation transcription. More recently her work has focused on phonological disorders and child

language acquisition Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to ...

. Perhaps her most significant contribution to linguistics is the fact that in 1987, together with John Kingston, she organized the first Laboratory Phonology conference at Columbus, Ohio. She served with Kingston as series editor for the

Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII of England, King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press in the world. It is also the King's Printer. Cambr ...

series ''Papers in Laboratory Phonology'' from 1987 through 2004. The

laboratory phonology Laboratory phonology is an approach to phonology that emphasizes the synergy between phonological theory and scientific experiments, including laboratory studies of human speech and experiments on the acquisition and productivity of phonological pat ...

movement was one of the two most important developments during the 1990s in the linguistic subdisciplines that study language sound systems, and gave rise to the

Association for Laboratory Phonology The Association for Laboratory Phonology is a non-profit professional society for researchers interested in the sound structure of language. It was founded to promote the scientific study of all aspects of phonetics and phonology of oral and sign l ...

. (The other important development was

Optimality Theory In linguistics, Optimality Theory (frequently abbreviated OT) is a linguistic model proposing that the observed forms of language arise from the optimal satisfaction of conflicting constraints. OT differs from other approaches to phonological ...

Honors and awards

In 1988 she won a

Presidential Young Investigator Award The Presidential Young Investigator Award (PYI) was awarded by the National Science Foundation of the United States Federal Government. The program operated from 1984 to 1991, and was replaced by the NSF Young Investigator (NYI) Awards and Presiden ...

from the National Science Foundation. She edited the

Journal of Phonetics The ''Journal of Phonetics'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal that covers topics in phonetics and phonology. It was established in 1973 and appears six times a year. It is published by Elsevier and the current editor-in-chief is Taehong Cho (Ha ...

from 1990 to 1994. Beckman was inducted as a Fellow in the Linguistic Society of America in 2011. In 2015, she received the Scientific Achievement Medal of the

International Speech Communication Association The International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) is a non-profit organization and one of the two main professional associations for speech communication science and technology, the other association being the IEEE Signal Processing Society ...

Personal life

Beckman is married to John S. Cikoski, a specialist for

Classical Chinese Classical Chinese, also known as Literary Chinese (古文 ''gǔwén'' "ancient text", or 文言 ''wényán'' "text speak", meaning "literary language/speech"; modern vernacular: 文言文 ''wényánwén'' "text speak text", meaning "literar ...

Selected publications

* * * *Beckman, Mary, Ken de Jong,

Sun-Ah Jun Sun-Ah Jun (born November 6, 1959) is a Korean-American professor of linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Education Jun received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Ohio State University in 1993, with a dissertation entitled, ''T ...

, & Sook-hyang Lee (1992) “The Interaction of Coarticulation and Prosody in Sound Change,” Language and Speech 35 (1, 2). pp. 45–58.

References

External links

Mary E. Beckman's Faculty Website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Beckman, Mary E. Linguists from the United States Cornell University alumni Ohio State University faculty Phoneticians Phonologists 1953 births Living people Speech perception researchers Women linguists Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America