UC Berkeley professor emeritus of linguistics John J. Ohala received the Acoustical Society of America’s Silver Medal in speech communication at the ASA’s recent meeting in Jacksonville, Florida.
John Ohala
Ohala was honored “for advancing the understanding of speech production and perception and applying phonetic principles to the study of spoken language change over time,” according to a news release from the society, an international organization devoted to the science and technology of sound.
“I regard this award as encouragement to continue the application of speech science to an understanding of how and why pronunciation changes over the centuries and millennia and thus to be able to reconstruct the phonetic aspect of parent languages.” said Ohala.
Ohala, who earned a Ph.D. in linguistics from UCLA, joined the Berkeley faculty in 1970 and now holds emeritus status. He is also a research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley.
Read more on the Acoustical Society of America’s website.