Professor of Linguistics
Dani Byrd is a Professor of Linguistics in the Dana and David Dornisfe College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California. She served for many years in the decanal administrative leadership of USC’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences — as the College’s vice dean for research advancement, vice dean for faculty and research, vice dean for faculty, vice dean for institutional affairs, and as executive vice dean and as interim dean. Byrd and her interdisciplinary team of engineering and linguistics collaborators study the uniquely human ability to communicate using language.
Her scientific research in linguistics and speech has been funded for three decades by the National Science Foundation and by NIH’s National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. Byrd specializes in the study of human speech production and articulatory coordination. Using cutting-edge magnetometer and real-time MRI technology for tracking and imaging inside the mouth and throat during speech, her interdisciplinary research program investigates language production and articulation modeling. She is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and teaches science in USC’s general education honors program “Thematic Option,” having published a textbook for undergraduates and lay science buffs Discovering Speech, Words and Mind (Byrd & Mintz).
Byrd’s work in the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience takes place in the Dynamic Imaging Science Center and deploys high-performance low-field MR imaging to wed state-of-the-art technology for imaging of the moving human vocal tract during speech production with a linguistically informed analysis of dynamic vocal tract constriction actions. The goal of this science is to understand the control and production of the compositional units of spoken language within a dynamical systems perspective. This interdisciplinary effort undertaken by the USC SPAN (Speech Production and Articulation kNowledge) Research Group combines real-time MR imaging, linguistic experimentation, and machine learning to advance our fundamental understanding of spoken language. Byrd is an expert in kinematic articulatory data collection and analysis including via electropalatography, electromagnetic articulography, and real-time MRI, and has invented new measurement and analysis approaches for assessing articulatory movement data. Her expertise in speech production research is synergistic with her training as a theoretical linguist, which serves to anchor her research focus on the cognitive representation of language.
Byrd’s research activity includes approximately 100 peer-reviewed publications in linguistics, speech science, imaging, and cognitive science. She has received the USC Dornsife Dean’s Award for Distinguished Service, is a Fellow of the Acoustical society of America (citation: “For research on the relation of linguistic structures to the temporal realization of speech”), and won the R. Bruce Lindsay Award from the Acoustical Society of America, for a scholar under 35 who has contributed substantially through published papers to the advancement of theoretical or applied acoustics. She was trained at Yale University (simultaneous BA/MA), the UCLA Department of Linguistics (PhD), and Haskins Laboratories (post-doctoral fellow; New Haven CT).