Kevin B. McGowan

I've just finished my third year of graduate school and I still find myself interested in every branch of linguistics but one (I'm not telling which one). Right now I'm primarily interested in speech perception and language change. I always list my interest areas as phonetics and computational linguistics, but, for me, computational linguistics isn't a separate pursuit but a framework and toolset for approaching all of linguistics.

Currently I have four main projects underway:

1. a concatenative speech synthesis project to test the hypothesis that coarticulation is essential information (signal) and not mere noise as many speech recognition and perception researchers like to insist. This work is my qualifying research project and, as such, is the only thing standing between me and candidacy.
2. a study, with Professors Beddor, Boland and Coetzee, using eye-tracking to study the time course of coarticulation perception
3. some corpus work on the Syllable Contact Law
4. an ultrasound investigation of Montana Salish articulation

I'll be starting my dissertation work this Fall. I plan to begin that project by working out an information theoretic interpretation of coarticulation. Specifically, a model that takes the work I'm currently doing with speech synthesis and uses it to explore the ways in which different theories of speech perception have explained and dealt with the phenomena of coarticulation (or not).