Dani Byrd

About

Dani Byrd is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Southern California, within the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on phonetics and phonology, and she is actively involved in research groups such as the USC Phonetics & Phonology Group and the USC SPAN Research Group. She contributes to the academic community through her work on speech, words, and the mind, and she has authored an introductory textbook titled 'Discovering Speech, Words, and Mind.' Professor Byrd is engaged in teaching courses related to phonetics and phonology and provides resources and support for students and colleagues in her field.

Research topics

• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Speech recognition
• Physics
• Linguistics
• Computer vision
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Cracking Prosody in Articulatory Phonology

  Annual Review of Linguistics · 2021 · 29 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Articulatory Phonology advances an account of phonological structure in which dynamically defined vocal tract tasks—gestures—are simultaneously and isomorphically units of cognitive representation and units of physical action. This paradigm has fundamentally altered our understanding of the linguistic representation of words. This article reviews the relatively recent incorporation of prosody into Articulatory Phonology. A capsule review of the Articulatory Phonology theoretical framework is pre…

  DOI

• Improved 3D real‐time MRI of speech production

  Magnetic Resonance in Medicine · 2021 · 22 citations

  PURPOSE: To provide 3D real-time MRI of speech production with improved spatio-temporal sharpness using randomized, variable-density, stack-of-spiral sampling combined with a 3D spatio-temporally constrained reconstruction. METHODS: temporal order. The strategy yielding highest image quality was chosen as the proposed method. We evaluated the proposed and original 3D real-time MRI methods in 2 healthy subjects performing speech production tasks that invoke rapid movements of articulators seen in…

  DOI

• Deep learning characterizes depression and suicidal ideation in young adults from eye movements

  npj Digital Medicine · 2026-03-28 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Objective biobehavioral markers for mental health conditions remain elusive, with diagnosis typically relying on self-reports and clinical interviews. We investigate eye tracking as a potential marker of attentional and mood biases associated with symptoms of depression and suicidal ideation from self-reported screening questionnaires. We analyze eye movements from 126 young adults during reading and responding to emotionally loaded sentences. A deep learning framework was designed to account fo…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• On the Relationship between Accent Strength and Articulatory Features

  2025-08-17 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Developing a High-performance Framework for Speech Emotion Recognition in Naturalistic Conditions Challenge for Emotional Attribute Prediction

  2025-08-17 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Speech Prosody and Articulatory Dynamics in Spoken Language

  NIH · $5.9M · 1997–2019

• Doctoral Dissertation Research: Articulatory Dynamics and Stability of Multi-gesture Complexes

  NSF · $19k · 2021–2023

• NIH Grant R29DC003172

  NIH · $553k · 2002

Frequent coauthors

• Louis Goldstein

  77 shared

• Shrikanth Narayanan

  60 shared

• Sungbok Lee

  Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

  41 shared

• Krishna S. Nayak

  21 shared

• Asterios Toutios

  University of Southern California

  21 shared

• Elliot Saltzman

  Boston University

  19 shared

• Erik Bresch

  Philips (Netherlands)

  17 shared

• Benjamin Parrell

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  15 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Linguistics

  University of Southern California

• M.A., Linguistics

  University of Southern California

• B.A., Linguistics

  University of Southern California

Similar researchers at University of Southern California

• Jason Zevinh-36
• Elsi Kaiserh-25