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astronomy

Mary Beckman

Mary Beckman is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Mary Beckman rather than just read about it. In short: Mary Esther Beckman (born September 1953) is a Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. Career Beckman received her PhD from Cornell University in 1984.

Key takeaways

  • Mary Beckman belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
  • Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
  • Connect Mary Beckman to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
  • Reproduce the core statement of Mary Beckman from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Mary Esther Beckman (born September 1953) is a Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the Ohio State University.

Career Beckman received her PhD from Cornell University in 1984. She was a Postdoctoral member of the technical staff in "Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence Research" at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, before joining the linguistics faculty at Ohio State University in 1985. She has directed at least twenty-five PhD dissertations to completion at Ohio State University. Her early research focused on prosody and the development of the Tones and Boundary Indexes (ToBI) system of intonation transcription. More recently her work has focused on phonological disorders and child language acquisition. Perhaps her most significant contribution to linguistics is the fact that in 1987, together with John Kingston, she organized the first Laboratory Phonology conference at Columbus, Ohio. She served with Kingston as series editor for the Cambridge University Press series Papers in Laboratory Phonology from 1987 through 2004. The laboratory phonology movement was one of the two most important developments during the 1990s in the linguistic subdisciplines that study language sound systems, and gave rise to the Association for Laboratory Phonology. (The other important development was Optimality Theory.)

Honors and awards In 1988 she won a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. She edited the Journal of Phonetics from 1990 to 1994. Beckman was inducted as a Fellow in the Linguistic Society of America in 2011. In 2015, she received the Scientific Achievement Medal of the International Speech Communication Association.

Anneliese Maier Award (2014)

Personal life Beckman was married to John S. Cikoski, a specialist for Classical Chinese. Cikoski died in 2022.

Selected publications Beckman, Mary E. (1986). Stress and Non-Stress Accent. Netherlands Phonetic Archives Series. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-013729-3. Pierrehumbert, Janet B.; Mary E. Beckman (1988). Japanese Tone Structure. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-16109-1. Kingston, John; Beckman, Mary (1990). Papers in Laboratory Phonology I: Between the Grammar and Physics of Speech. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-36238-2. Beckman, Mary, Ken de Jong, Sun-Ah Jun, & Sook-hyang Lee (1992) “The Interaction of Coarticulation and Prosody in Sound Change,” Language and Speech 35 (1, 2). pp. 45–58. doi:10.1177/002383099203500205

References

External links Mary E. Beckman's Faculty Website Archived 2007-06-26 at the Wayback Machine LSA Institute 2005 Bio of Mary Beckman

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Mary Beckman

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Mary Beckman claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Mary Beckman before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Mary Beckman ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Mary Beckman

In research
Mary Beckman appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry
Engineering practice reuses Mary Beckman in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom
Mary Beckman is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1953 births, American phoneticians, American women linguists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life
Look for Mary Beckman outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.
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How to study Mary Beckman in 20 minutes

  1. Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
  2. Close the page and write down what Mary Beckman means in your own words.
  3. Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
  4. Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
  5. Explain Mary Beckman out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Mary Beckman in simple terms?

Mary Esther Beckman (born September 1953) is a Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. Career Beckman received her PhD from Cornell University in 1984.

Why does Mary Beckman matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Mary Beckman?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Mary Beckman.

Tags

  • 1953 births
  • American phoneticians
  • American women linguists
  • Cornell University alumni
  • Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America
  • Living people
  • Ohio State University faculty
  • Phonologists from the United States
  • Speech perception researchers

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