Robert F. Port

Professional Information

B.A., Social Relations, Johns Hopkins University, 1965
M.A, Linguistics, Columbia University, 1972
Ph.D., University of Connecticut, 1976. My thesis work was conducted at Haskins Laboratories , New Haven, Connecticut.

Personal Information

My wife Diane Kewley-Port and I were on sabbatical for academic year 1995-1996 and spent 5 months at ATR Labs, Human Information Processing (Kyoto Prefecture, Japan). We lived only three miles from the awesome 16 meter high (from knees to curly head) Daibutsu (Great Buddha) of Nara completed in 751 AD.

Some Projects

Afro Hoosier Intl.
A band playing popular music from Africa and the African diaspora.

Dennis Klatt's History of Speech Synthesis web page with audio clips of synthetic speech. Mafuyu Kitahara and I put this page together as a public service to the speech research community.

Research Topics

Phonetics and Phonology of Languages
Temporal Aspects of Speech and Audition
Rhythm in Music and Language
Dynamical Models for Perception and Motor Control
Dynamics in General Cognition
Methods for Teaching Pronunciation to Second Language Learners

The primary focus of my work is problem of time and temporal patterns. Temporal patterns are a major problem for cognitive science since conventional symbolic models deal naturally only with static systems or with patterns specifiable in absolute durations (like milliseconds).

Thus my research focusses on auditory pattern perception, speech and linguistics. I have addressed such topics as the temporal structure of words and phrases in English, Japanese, German, Arabic, etc. I am convinced that only models based on dynamical systems offer the right properties for handling time in a way that will be useful for an animal living in a physical world. Some kinds of connectionist models and other models based on differential equations have the right kind of dynamical properties.

This work is compatible with a view of general cognition that is based on dynamical systems theory rather than symbol-based computational models.
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The picture shows Bob with his Slinky, his favorite tool for teaching acoustics and the Pythagorean principle of harmonic timing. But how did he get it into that great S shape?

November 16, 2004
RFP