Peter Ladefoged - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Peter Ladefoged was born on September 17, 1925, in Sutton (then in Surrey, now in Greater London), England to Niels, an importer of Danish bacon and cheese, and his wife, Marie Frances. He attended Haileybury College from 1938–43, and Caius College, a constituent college of Cambridge University from 1943–44. His university education was then interrupted by service in the Royal Sussex Regiment during World War II from 1944–47. He resumed his education at the University of Edinburgh, intending to study English literature but soon became fascinated by the sounds of speech. He received an M.A. (1951) and a Ph.D. (1959) in Phonetics.

He was able to receive a first degree after only two years as an undergraduate at Edinburgh because returning World War II servicemen were allowed a year off from the usual three year requirement for an Ordinary degree. After receiving an M.A. (ordinary) (war emergency) in 1951, he went on to do a year's postgraduate work in phonetics. At the end of that year he got his first job, as a lab assistant cutting vinyl recordings. On January 1, 1953, he was promoted to Assistant Lecturer in Phonetics

In the late 1950s, Ladefoged decided to work in the United States, but this required a Ph.D. degree. The university registrar allowed him to count the three years that he was a member of the faculty. All he needed was to complete a thesis. Ladefoged's dissertation was on the "nature of vowel quality," specifically on the cardinal vowels and their articulatory vs. auditory basis. After consultation with and advice from David Abercrombie, the head of the Phonetics Department, Ladefoged took three papers that he had already published on aspects of vowel quality, and added an introductory survey. He also appended some work that he had been doing on cardinal vowels with Daniel Jones, who had recently retired from the chair of phonetics at University College London. Abercrombie arranged a grant enabling Jones to be a consultant on Ladefoged's project to study the acoustic quality of cardinal vowels, which enabled him an opportunity to work with the leading phonetician of the time. The sets of vowels recorded under Jones’s supervision were made by his former pupils. Although not very noteworthy, this part of his project provided an early example of the problems of analyzing vowels spectrographically.

After completing his thesis, Ladefoged received his Ph.D. upon completion of an oral exam that included Walter Lawrence – the inventor of PAT, the first parametric speech synthesizer – as an outside examiner. It was through Lawrence that Ladefoged met Donald Broadbent, who was a psychologist working in Cambridge at the time. They teamed together to conduct experiments using synthetic speech, about the relative nature of vowel quality. This led to their working together on other aspects of speech perception, and through Broadbent he learned how to do work in perceptual psychology.

Another person whom Ladefoged was able to work with through David Abercrombie was David Whitteridge, the Professor of Physiology, who was interested in the control of the respiratory system in speech. Ladefoged started working in Whitteridge's lab, at first every Saturday morning, then for days at a time, and then longer and longer as they realized that the control of the respiratory muscles was no simple matter. Said Ladefoged, "It was really Whitteridge who taught me to be a scientist."