Gayle Ayers Elam, Ph.D.

Linguist

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Background

After receiving my Ph.D. in Linguistics I went to work in industry as a computational linguist. I have been fortunate to be involved in many projects that use my expertise in and love of prosody and intonation. I have worked for small, medium, and large corporations, and I now run my own consulting business that focuses on projects that need a linguist’s expertise.

Please contact me to discuss how I can help in your projects. I can help your telephone information systems and dialog systems benefit from natural sounding prompts using prerecorded speech and well planned dialog interactions. I am one of the experts in ToBI intonational labeling of English corpora. I have experience in child language research, especially field observation and child interactions. I can design, conduct, and analyze the results of experiments on various kinds of data and materials.

Education

	Ph.D. 1996	Linguistics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
		Dissertation: Nuclear Accent Types and Prominence: Some Psycholinguistic Experiments
	B.A. 1989	Linguistics, Rice University, Houston, TX

Interests

Prosody and intonation
Influence of prosody on sentence- and discourse-level processing and understanding
Phonetics
Psycholinguistics
Discourse structure
ToBI intonational labeling
Interface design (voice and visual)
Dialog systems (esp. natural sounding prompts and dialog management in computer dialog systems)
Language acquisition in young children
Languages: Swedish, German, French, Mandarin, and others...

Last Modified: May 2011