Getting to Know Your Fellow Researchers: Julia Hirschberg

After thinking about this a while, I think it’s some work Jacques Terken (then of IPO but   visiting  Bell Labs at the time) and I did, published in Language and Speech in 1994: Deaccentuation of words representing ‘given’information: Effects of persistence of grammatical function and surface position.  It’s unusual in my experience to get really clear-cut results in an open-ended study like this one, where we had some ideas of what factors might influence how speakers produced “given” items but the results were surprisingly interesting and quite informative.  It was also great fun working with Jacques because we came from different schools of modeling intonation and had very different views of how to talk about the results we got, but we had so much fun planning and running the experiments and agreeing on ways of assessing accentuation that it worked out extremely well.  So this is one of my papers I think deserves more attention.