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Hi.  I am Jennifer Cole.  I am a linguist and I study
phonology -- which is the sound-system of human
languages.  At the Beckman Institute I 
investigate phonology in two contexts.
One is cognitive science.  And so I am asking about 
how is it that people come to know about the sounds 
of their language and to how they combine them to 
form words of their language.
And I study this from the perspective of how 
people speak, as well as how people listen.
We bring people into our laboratory 
and we record them speaking
in conversations.  We use computer
software to investigate the acoustics --
-- to take measurements from the acoustic 
signal -- and try to understand then how it
is that the information in the acoustic signal
allows people to understand meaning in speech.
I am also interested in developing
computer systems that use these
linguistic models of speech production
and speech perception; to try to
build computers that can
speak with humans or that can understand
speech so that someday we will be able to
sit down in front of our computers and
just start talking.
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