For Victoria Anderson, graduate education at UCLA has meant traveling backward and forward from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern Hemisphere, and from traditional to futuristic settings. In Australia, Victoria conducted research on Arrernte, the language of an aboriginal community who have lived near Alice Springs for hundreds of years. In the Silicon Valley, she helped Apple create tools that let computers speak to us.

Her dissertation in linguistics will describe the characteristics of four t-like sounds in Arrernte. One of the questions she wants to answer is, "When so many similar sounds are used in a language, does that have a predictable effect on how speakers make the sounds?"

To get her data, she had to persuade a dozen residents of a settlement in Central Australia to participate in a procedure called palatography. She would carefully coat a participant's palate or tongue with an edible paint made of olive oil and digestive charcoal, have them say a word, and then do a videorecording of the resulting pattern. This would show where their tongue made contact with the roof of their mouth in creating each sound. She also took dental impressions of participant's mouths, so that the two-dimensional video recordings could be interpreted in three dimensions. In addition, she made audio recordings of the people and did listening tests to find out how they perceived different sounds.

And along the way, she learned how grubs taste (like a mixture of peanut butter and scrambled eggs.) "There were so many wonderful cultural experiences," Victoria says, like going out in her truck with women of the community to collect and hunt "bush foods", porcupines and emus. "People are such skilled hunters. We'd be driving down the road, and one of the women would tell me to pull over. She would have seen a small lizard, 50 meters away, that I couldn't see until we got right up close. So we'd pull over, get the lizard, and we'd cook it and eat it right there."

Although her experience in Silicon Valley was not as exotic, it also provides a possible career avenue. It all began when John Choi, then a fellow graduate student who was interning at Apple, invited her "to fly up to Northern California and do a couple of recordings." She did a set of recordings that provided the main female voice for a commercial speech synthesis product called Macin Talk.

Last year Apple invited Victoria back to help create and record a database of American English for its new speech synthesis product, PlainTalk. There are many possible applications of such products, from interacting with your computer by phone, to adding realism to computer games, to helping blind users or those with other disabilities make use of computers.

An undergraduate at UC Berkeley, Victoria was drawn south by what is "one of the leading phonetics labs in the world," along with the well-respected phonetic team of Ian Maddieson and Peter Ladefoged, who are now her graduate advisers. The lab is headed by Linguistics Professor Patricia Keating. "Just the presence of all these people in a single place is terribly exciting. The environment of the lab is both very supportive and intellectually rigorous."

Published in Fall 1997, Graduate Quarterly