Adventures of a J. J. Jenkins student in speech technology research.
Ann K. Syrdal · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2008
Two of the most valuable lessons I learned from Jenkins were (1) to focus on what interests me and explore why it interests me and (2) that an experiment with unexpected results can be more valuable than one that confirms the hypothesis. My graduate student years in Minnesota at the Center for Research in Human Learning, which Jenkins directed, were an exciting and revolutionary time, both on a large societal scale and academically. Experimental psychology at Minnesota had been a bastion of behaviorism and learning theory. Jenkins was our fearless leader in advancing the revolutionary ideas and emerging paradigms of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. In this new field, it was now possible to be scientifically rigorous and to study mental as well as behavioral phenomena. Jenkins and co-workers who played a role in my education at Minnesota have influenced both my earlier academic research and my research in speech technology over the past 22 years. After a brief overview of how I as an experimental/cognitive/perceptual/psycholinguist contributed to several speech technology projects, my talk will focus on unit selection text-to-speech synthesis and how studying and modeling the perception of speech is central to the technology.