Osamu Fujimura 藤村靖 (August 29, 1927 – March 13, 2017) was a Japanese physicist, phonetician and linguist, recognized as one of the pioneers of speech science.
Fujimura was also known for his influential work in the diverse field of speech-related studies including acoustics, phonetics/phonology, instrumentation techniques, speech production mechanisms, and computational/theoretical linguistics.
He then continued his research at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, in the U.S., from 1973 to 1988 as a department head, working for Max Mathews.
He authored, co-authored or edited over 256 scientific publications covering a vast range of topics including physics, speech acoustics and articulation, phonology, kanji transcription methods, syntax, and more.
[6] The C/D model is an explicit theory of how mental, phonological information is mapped onto actual physiological articulatory commands.
During this time Fujimura worked with a number of scientists and is remembered for encouraging young researchers including Mark Liberman, Janet Pierrehumbert, William Poser, Mary Beckman, Marian Macchi, Sue Hertz, Jan Edwards, and Julia Hirschberg.
In 1988, Fujimura moved to the Department of Speech & Hearing Science at Ohio State University where he worked until retiring as a Professor Emeritus in 2003.
From 1997 to 1998 he took sabbatical leave from OSU to be a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Invitation Fellow at the Research Institute of Asian and African Languages and Cultures at the Tokyo University for Foreign Studies.
It was during this time that Fujimura began to formulate the C/D model of speech articulation while mentoring researchers such as Reiner Wilhelms Tricarico, Chao-Min Wu, Donna Erickson, Kerrie Beechler Obert, Caroline Menezez, and Bryan Pardo.
After retirement from OSU, he was a researcher at the Center of Excellence (COE), Nagoya University from 2003 to 2004 working with professors K. Kakehi & F. Itakura.
They used extremely low doses of X-ray to track the movement of the tongue and oral chamber in order to study how humans uttered sounds.
The Fujimura family is descended from the Miyamoto clan (源氏), remotely related to the samurai Minamoto Yoritomo (源頼朝), who founded the Kamakura Bakufu (military government site) as a Shōgun (将軍) in the 12th century.