Catherine Phebe Browman ([ˈkæθrɪn ˈfibi ˈbraʊ̯mən]; 1945–18 July 2008[1]) was an American linguist and speech scientist.
[5] Browman’s dissertation, titled "Tip of the Tongue and Slip of the Ear: Implications for Language Processing",[2] analyzed and compared the lexical retrieval errors (the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon) and the perceptual errors (“slips of the ear”) that occur during casual conversation.
The first chapter provides a general description of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon; Browman analyzes the role of unit size (full syllable, sub-syllable, consonant cluster, etc.
Here, Browman cites two sources of perceptual errors: low-level acoustic misanalysis and interference from higher lexical levels.
After graduating, Browman returned to Bell Telephone Laboratories to work as a postdoc with Osamu Fujimura.
Upon leaving NYU, she was replaced by Noriko Umeda, whom Browman had worked with at Bell Laboratories prior to graduate school.
Later that same year, Browman began her career at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut where she would develop Articulatory Phonology,[5] her most significant contribution to the field of linguistics.
This differs from previous phonological theories which captured linguistically significant aspects in speech as non-overlapping sequences of segmental units built from features.
[14] Gestures are the most basic unit of articulatory phonology, and are defined in terms of Elliot Saltzman’s task dynamics.
In order to visualize what an utterance looks like, this model uses mathematics that describe damped mass-spring movements to characterize the articulators’ trajectories.
[16] Firstly, gestures are speech tasks that represent the formation and release of oral constrictions, an action that usually involves the motion of multiple articulators.
[17] For example, [t] consists of the gestures "GLO wide" (to indicate voicelessness) and "TT alveolar closed" (to indicate place and extent of constriction).
She also explains that, whereas ‘had’ and ‘add’ previously would have been analyzed as differing by the absence of a segment (/h/) and ‘bad’ and ‘pad’ by a single feature.
Browman analyzes articulatory evidence from American English words containing different kinds of consonants and clusters.
Under Bowman's Articulatory Phonology analysis, the relation between the syllable-initial consonant and the following vowel gesture is defined by a global measure.
She found that as more consonants are added (example: sat, spat, splat), the timing of the whole onset cluster is adjusted.
[18] Browman’s paper, "The Natural Mnemopath: or, What You Know About Words You Forget", was presented at the 86th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.
Her final analysis reveals that semantic factors, syntactic categories, syllable number, and the initial phoneme and grapheme are known prior to recall.
[19] Another one of her papers, "Frigidity or feature detectors-slips of the ear", was presented at the 90th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Francisco, California in 1975.
[20] Her paper "Targetless schwa: an articulatory analysis" was presented at the Second Conference of Laboratory Phonology in Edinburgh, Scotland which ran from June 28, 1989 to July 3, 1989.
[21] Browman's paper looks at data from the Tokyo X-ray archive produced by a speaker of American English.
The results found that during the gap between the second and third lip closures, the tongue body moves toward a schwa-like position, where a schwa sound is then articulated.
[22] Bowman's Articulatory Phonology has been noted by other phonologists, like Nancy Hall, as being successful in analyzing the way pronunciation changes during casual speech.
Hall points out that when spoken in a casual conversation, some sounds in words blend into their surroundings or disappear altogether.
Additionally, Hall criticizes Browman’s theory as lacking in sufficient suprasegmental structure, as it gives primacy to the movements of the articulators rather than prosodic features.
Browman took the latter positions as she believes that the articulatory gesture is the single basic unit for both phonological and phonetic representations.
These researchers believe that the categorical alterations of phonology and the imprecise phonetic movements in speech cannot be captured by the same representation.