Mark Yoffe Liberman is an American

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

. He has a dual appointment at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

, as Trustee Professor of Phonetics in the Department of Linguistics, and as a professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. He is the founder and director of the

Linguistic Data Consortium The Linguistic Data Consortium is an open consortium of universities, companies and government research laboratories. It creates, collects and distributes speech and text databases, lexicons, and other resources for linguistics research and developm ...

. Liberman is the Faculty Director of Ware College House at the

Early life

Liberman is the son of psychologists

Alvin Liberman Alvin Meyer Liberman (; May 10, 1917 – January 13, 2000) was born in St. Joseph, Missouri. Liberman was an American psychologist. His ideas set the agenda for fifty years of psychological research in speech perception. Biography Liberman rece ...

and

Isabelle Liberman Isabelle Yoffe Liberman (1918–1990) was an American psychologist, born in Latvia, who was an expert on reading disabilities, including dyslexia. Isabelle Liberman received her bachelor's degree from Vassar College and her doctorate from Yale Uni ...

. Mark Liberman attended

Harvard College Harvard College is the undergraduate college of Harvard University, an Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636, Harvard College is the original school of Harvard University, the oldest institution of higher lea ...

but did not graduate. After two years' service in the

US Army The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, cla ...

in Vietnam, he enrolled in graduate school in

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

, from which he received a

Master of Science A Master of Science ( la, Magisterii Scientiae; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree in the field of science awarded by universities in many countries or a person holding such a degree. In contrast to ...

(1972) and a PhD (1975).

Career

From 1975 to 1990, he was a Member of Technical Staff at

Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

Research

Liberman's main research interests lie in

phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

, prosody, and other aspects of

speech communication Speech is a human vocal communication using language. Each language uses phonetic combinations of vowel and consonant sounds that form the sound of its words (that is, all English words sound different from all French words, even if they are th ...

. His early research established the linguistic subfield of metrical phonology. Much of his current research is conducted through

computational Computation is any type of arithmetic or non-arithmetic calculation that follows a well-defined model (e.g., an algorithm). Mechanical or electronic devices (or, historically, people) that perform computations are known as ''computers''. An espe ...

analyses of linguistic

corpora Corpus is Latin for "body". It may refer to: Linguistics * Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts * Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files * Corpus linguistics, a branch of linguistics Music * ...

. In 2017, Liberman was the recipient of the

IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award The IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award is a Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers#Technical field awards, Technical Field Award presented by the IEEE for an outstanding contribution to the advancement of speech a ...

. Liberman is a founding co-

editor Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, photographic, visual, audible, or cinematic material used by a person or an entity to convey a message or information. The editing process can involve correction, condensation, orga ...

of the '' Annual Review of Linguistics''. Liberman is also the founder of (and frequent contributor to)

Language Log ''Language Log'' is a collaborative language blog maintained by Mark Liberman, a phonetician at the University of Pennsylvania. Most of the posts focus on language use in the media and in popular culture. Text available through Google Search fr ...

, a blog with a broad cast of dozens of professional linguists. The concept of the ''

eggcorn An eggcorn is the alteration of a phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements,, sense 2 creating a new phrase having a different meaning from the original but which still makes sense and is plausible when used ...

'' was first proposed in one of his posts there.

Mobile phones and endangered languages

In 2012, Liberman and Steven Bird began a US$101,501 project "to use

mobile telephones A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...

to collect larger amounts of data on undocumented

endangered languages An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead langu ...

than would ever be possible through usual fieldwork." The project resulted in the

mobile app A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on d ...

Aikuma.

Books

References

External links

*
Mark Liberman
at Ware College House, UPenn {{DEFAULTSORT:Liberman, Mark Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Phoneticians Linguists from the United States Harvard College alumni University of Pennsylvania faculty MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences alumni American bloggers Scientists at Bell Labs Endangered languages Annual Reviews (publisher) editors Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America