[2][3] It has been widely influential in speech technology, psycholinguistics, and theories of language form and meaning.

[4] Pierrehumbert is also affiliated with the New Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour at the University of Canterbury.

She joined AT&T Bell Labs as a member of Technical Staff in linguistics and artificial intelligence research in 1982, where her collaborators included Mary Beckman, Julia Hirschberg, and Mark Liberman.

She is one of the founders of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, an interdisciplinary initiative to develop advanced scientific methods for studying language sound structure.

[8] She held the Edward Sapir Professorship[9] at the 2013 Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute hosted by the University of Michigan.