Patrice Beddor received a B.S. from the University of Minnesota in French. She spent a year of her Ph.D. program studying in Paris at the Universite de Paris VII, Sorbonne from 1976-1977, and returned to the University of Minnesota to finish her Ph.D. in Linguistics.
Career
Beddor has spent her career working at universities including Yale, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and the University of Chicago. Her research has dealt with phonetics, including work in coarticulation, speech perception, and the relationship between perception and production. She has also done work in laboratory phonology, especially the phonetic underpinnings of sound change, with an interest in the relation between the cognitive representation and the physical instantiation of speech. She has published two books in the field of phonology, and has been published in prominent journals as well as the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. in 2011 she was named a John C. Catford Collegiate Professor of Linguistics. She served as the Chair for the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan from 2004 to 2010, and later served as interim chair from 2013-2014. Beddor is focused mostly in the Fields of Phonetics, Perception- Production relations, and Sound change. She has been a linguistics faculty member at University of Michigan since 1987, and much of her research focuses on production, acoustics, and perception of coarticulation. She is an elected member of the International Phonetic Association Council, and is a member of the Weinberg institute for Cognitive ScienceExecutive Committee.
Current research
Currently Beddor is working on a study involving listener’s moment-by-moment use of coarticulatory information as it unfolds in real time. The project explores whether the time course of the listener’s perception of coarticulation is linked to that individual’s own production patterns. Her research is, in part, motivated by an interest in the initiation of certain patterns of sound change.
Teaching
In addition to research she is an accomplished professor and mentor. She has spent a large part of her career working with undergraduate and graduate students, and has received the University of Michigan LSA Excellence in Education award, as well as the Rackham School of Graduate Studies John D’Arms award.
