Jennifer S. Cole

Who is Jennifer S. Cole?

Jennifer Sandra Cole is a professor of linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research uses experimental and computational methods to study the sound structure of language. She is General Editor of Laboratory Phonology, and a founding member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.

Her Ph.D. dissertation, Planar Phonology and Morphology, was completed in 1987, under the supervision of Morris Halle, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. In 1991, the study was recognized by Garland Publishing and presented as an Outstanding Dissertation in Linguistics. Cole introduced ranked constraints in formal grammar to model the interaction between morphology and phonology. This was one of the first works in the generative phonology framework to model phonological grammar using constraint ranking, an approach which has been developed in Optimality Theory.

A primary focus of Cole's research is on variation in the phonetic expression of words and the role of prosodic phrasing and prominence in influencing phonetic variation. She applies linguistic models of prosody to research in computer speech recognition.