Patrice Speeter Beddor

Patrice (Pam) Beddor, John C. Catford Collegiate Professor of Linguistics, studies the relation between the cognitive and physical aspects of sound structures. She investigates how speakers convey, and listeners process, linguistic information, with a particular focus on the information conveyed by overlapping or coarticulated speech gestures. Her recent work especially studies individual differences in producing and perceiving coarticulation, and asks whether a listener’s perceptual use of coarticulatory information in real time correlates with that listener-speaker's own coarticulated productions. Her study of the production-perception relation, and of the complex (linguistic, cognitive, and social) factors that influence it, is motivated by interests in both phonetic theory and theories of sound change.

Pam Beddor primarily teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in phonetics (articulation, acoustics, speech perception, speech science, the phonetics of sound change). In the past several years she has chaired or co-chaired the doctoral committees of Kelly Wright (Black professionalism: three studies on language usage; now at Virginia Tech), Jian Zhu (A computational account of selected patterns of sociolinguistic variation and change; now at the University of British Columbia), Ian Calloway (Perceptual asymmetry and sound change; now in industry), Jiseung Kim (Production and perception of prosodic boundaries in American English; now at Radboud University, Nijmegen), and Harim Kwon (Perceptually driven changes in bilingual speakers' production of L1 and L2; now at Seoul National University). She also regularly supervises undergraduate honors theses in speech perception.

She is an elected member of the International Phonetic Association Permanent Council. Previously on the College of LSA's task force to develop an undergraduate major in cognitive science, she is now a member of the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science Executive Committee. She was formerly Linguistics Department chair and editor of the Journal of Phonetics.

Field(s) of Study

• Phonetics
• Speech perception-production relation
• Phonetics-phonology relation
• Sound change