About

Jennifer Cole is a social and cultural anthropologist whose work examines how personal change and individual development shape, and are shaped by, broader political, economic, and cultural transformations. Her research primarily focuses on Africa, specifically the island of Madagascar, and explores the legacy of Madagascar’s colonial and post-colonial encounter with France. Her work addresses topics such as memory and forgetting, youth and generational change, gender, sexuality, kinship, and migration, analyzing the interplay between historical change and individual experience. Her first book, 'Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar,' examined ritual practices that mediated peasants’ memories of the colonial past and how local practices centered on ancestors mediated these memories. This work depicted how a community deals with a divisive colonial past and contributed a theory of social and cultural memory. Her second book, 'Sex and Salvation: Imagining the Future in Madagascar,' investigated the relationship between youth and social change, focusing on themes such as women’s entry into the sexual economy and their conversion to Pentecostal Christianity. Cole has also co-edited volumes on youth, globalization, love, and social change, and her current research explores African migration to Europe, including Malagasy women’s migration and marriage to French men, with a focus on cultural ideas of gender and kinship amid tightening immigration laws and xenophobia.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Medicine
• Speech recognition
• Artificial Intelligence
• Cognitive psychology
• Linguistics
• Developmental psychology
• Cognitive science
• Audiology
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Acoustics
• Physics

Selected publications

• Relating Scalar Inference and Alternative Activation: A View from the Rise-Fall-Rise Tune in American English

  Experiments in Linguistic Meaning · 2025-01-24 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The rise-fall-rise (RFR) tune in American English has received numerous theoretical accounts to describe its meaning contribution, with a consistent theme being the relationship between RFR and "higher alternatives." However, Autosegmental-Metrical theory predicts three RFR-shaped tunes which differ in the rising pitch accent used (H*, L+H*, L*+H), raising the question of whether different RFR-shaped tunes in fact behave differently. We investigate this question under the lens of scalar inference (SI). We find that RFR-shaped tunes with different pitch accents behave similarly in offline interpretation, increasing the rate of SI calculation relative to falling tunes. In online processing using cross-modal priming with lexical decision, we find an asymmetry in the processing profile of two RFR-shaped tunes: H*L-H% leads to additional facilitation of the higher alternative, while L*+HL-H% leads to less facilitation. We describe these results in relation to differences in pitch range and discuss how they relate to ongoing debates about RFR.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Prosody and Information Structure

  Annual Review of Linguistics · 2025-12-09 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In speech, information is conveyed using words, syntactic structures, and prosody to distinguish new information from discourse-given or inferable information and link the meanings of words and phrases to discourse antecedents. This review examines the role of prosody in communicating information structure. The point of departure is seminal work on information structure developed with reference to English, and corresponding work laying the foundation for current approaches to prosody as a phonological phenomenon. Corpus and experimental studies are reviewed for evidence that ( a ) speakers produce prosody in relation to focus and givenness and ( b ) listeners perceive and interpret prosodic cues to information structure meaning. Empirical findings show qualified evidence that listeners attend to prosody in processing and comprehending speech, though production data clearly show a many-to-many correspondence between form and meaning. A proposal that bridges these findings relates phonological and/or phonetic prominence scales to scales over information structure.

  PublisherDOI

• Feedback and feedforward control of intonation in cerebellar ataxia

  Language Cognition and Neuroscience · 2025-08-13

  article
  PublisherDOI

• On the salience of prenuclear accents: evidence from an imitation study

  Phonetica · 2025-03-17 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Whereas some authors claim that the distribution of prenuclear accents in English largely follows from rhythmic and other non-informational considerations, other authors report a small but meaningful effect of prenuclear accents on the interpretation of sentences. In this paper we report on an experiment where native English speakers were asked to repeat stimulus sentences with one of three different accentual patterns on a word in sentence-initial prenuclear position: unaccented, with a high pitch accent on the syllable with primary stress or with a high accent on an earlier syllable with secondary stress. Participants were moderately successful in reproducing the intonational patterns. The early high accent pattern was reproduced particularly well. An automatic classification algorithm nevertheless produced four clusters of contours, instead of the three patterns present in the stimuli. Two distinct contours were used to signal the presence of a high tone before the syllable with primary stress. We conclude that the early high accent pattern is a strong attractor in imitations, but it was implemented with F0 trajectories that would be analyzed as phonologically different, suggesting an equivalence class of prenuclear contours. We also note a preference for rhythmic anchoring in the prenuclear position.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A distinct set of brain areas process prosody--the melody of speech

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025-12-14 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Human speech carries information beyond the words themselves: pitch, loudness, duration, and pauses-jointly referred to as 'prosody'-emphasize critical words, help group words into phrases, and convey emotional and other socially-relevant information. Using a novel fMRI paradigm, we identify a set of prosody-responsive brain areas and then richly characterize them across 8 experiments (25 experimental conditions; n=51 participants). These areas-located on the lateral temporal surface bilaterally and in the frontal lobe-respond to the presence of prosody in both meaningful and meaningless speech, and are distinct from nearby temporal pitch- and speech-perception areas and from frontal areas sensitive to general cognitive and attentional demands. They are also dissociable from-but show partial overlap with-the language areas and with the area that processes dynamic facial expressions. Thus, prosodic information is processed by a distinct set of brain areas, which may help integrate linguistic meanings with non-verbal communicative signals.

  PublisherDOI

• Metrical enhancement in American English nuclear tunes

  Glossa a journal of general linguistics · 2024-06-25

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We present two experiments aimed at testing the nature of intonational categories through the lens of enhancement. In an imitative speech production paradigm, speakers heard a model intonational tune and were prompted to reproduce that tune on a new sentence in which the syllable count of the word carrying the tune varied. Using the prevalent auto-segmental metrical model of American English as a basis for potential tune categories, we test how distinctions among tunes are enhanced across different metrical structures. First, with a clustering analysis, we find that not all predicted distinctions are emergent. Secondly, only the largest distinctions, those that emerge in the clustering analysis, are enhanced as a function of metrical structure. Measurable differences between tunes which cluster together are detectable, but critically, are not enhanced. We discuss what these results mean for the nature and number of intonational categories in the system.

  PublisherDOI

• Crowdsourced and Automatic Speech Prominence Estimation

  2024-03-18 · 3 citations

  article

  The prominence of a spoken word is the degree to which an average native listener perceives the word as salient or emphasized relative to its context. Speech prominence estimation is the process of assigning a numeric value to the prominence of each word in an utterance. These prominence labels are useful for linguistic analysis, as well as training automated systems to perform emphasis-controlled text-to-speech or emotion recognition. Manually annotating prominence is time-consuming and expensive, which motivates the development of automated methods for speech prominence estimation. However, developing such an automated system using machine-learning methods requires human-annotated training data. Using our system for acquiring such human annotations, we collect and open-source crowd-sourced annotations of a portion of the LibriTTS dataset. We use these annotations as ground truth to train a neural speech prominence estimator that generalizes to unseen speakers, datasets, and speaking styles. We investigate design decisions for neural prominence estimation as well as how neural prominence estimation improves as a function of two key factors of annotation cost: dataset size and the number of annotations per utterance.

  PublisherDOI

• Functional modeling of F0 variation across speakers and between phonological categories: Rising pitch accents in American English

  2024-06-30

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The Autosegmental-Metrical model of American English distinguishes three pitch accents with rising F0 trajectories (H*, L+H*, L*+H), differing in peak alignment and presence vs. absence of a low pitch marking the rise onset.Empirical studies report additional distinctions in the dynamics and scaling of the F0 rise, raising the question of which properties best capture variation among accents.We use functional principal components analysis (FPCA) to examine dynamic properties of accentual F0 trajectories in data from an intonation imitation experiment.F0 trajectories from 70 speakers producing rising accents on the phrase-final (nuclear) accented word were submitted to FPCA.The first three PCs account for 95% of variation in F0 trajectories and each shows significant differences between the three rising accents.Variation in PC1 primarily relates to differences in the overall F0 level of the trajectory, PC2 captures differences in rise shape (scooped vs. domed rise) and PC3 captures fine variation from a following Low phrase accent.Alignment distinctions are distributed across all three PCs.Examination of individual speakers shows all use PC1 and PC2 to some degree to distinguish rising accents, with no trading relations.Rises are variously implemented through level or shape distinctions, to varying degrees across individuals.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• K-means and hierarchical clustering of f0 contours

  2024-09-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• A stochastic dynamical system for pitch accents and its inversion

  2024-06-30

  articleOpen access

  The literature on the pitch accents of American English (AE) reveals substantial variation across speakers and within accent categories, as well as variation in which pitch accent category is produced in a given discourse context. In this work we present a stochastic revision of a deterministic dynamical system theory of American English pitch accents. This theory generates F0 trajectories from a system of differential equations that govern the change in F0 over time, capturing the distinctions in peak alignment and scaling that characterize within-and across-category variation in AE pitch accents. The stochastic model has one free parameter which is set by the language’s phonological system. We also present a stochastic model of perception of pitch accents, which invokes the production model to generate hypotheses about the phonological free parameter describing the observed trajectory. We therefore aim to provide a framework in which variability can be explicitly modeled, and in which the interaction of phonology, production, and perception of prosody can also be modeled.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• RI-Collaborative Research: Landmark-based robust speech recognition using prosody-guided models of speech variability

  NSF · $541k · 2007–2012

• Memory and context effects on representations of variation in phrasal intonation

  NSF · $420k · 2020–2025

Frequent coauthors

• Mark Hasegawa–Johnson

  35 shared

• Yoonsook Mo

  16 shared

• Timothy Mahrt

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  15 shared

• Jeremy Steffman

  14 shared

• Stefanie Shattuck‐Hufnagel

  10 shared

• José Ignacio Hualde

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  10 shared

• Ilaria Mozzi

  Princeton University

  8 shared

• Claudia Neumann

  8 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Linguistics & Philosophy

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1987

Awards & honors

• Franklin Research Fellowship
• Bertram J. Cohler BA Thesis Prize