Genealogy of Kenneth N. Stevens and the Speech Communication Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ken often told a story to his advisees, illustrating how a seemingly insignificant event could change the course of a life. When Ken began his graduate studies at MIT, Leo Beranek learned that he had taken an acoustics class as an undergraduate and recruited him as a teaching assistant. Beranek was doing research on speech acoustics, and soon Ken was one of his research assistants. Thus, Ken’s decision to take an undergraduate acoustics course led him to his lifetime of work in speech communication, in which he found boundless pleasure. After completing his Sc.D. in 1952, Ken joined the MIT Faculty. His first doctoral student was James Flanagan. He supervised at least 31 more doctoral students and scores of post-doctoral, masters, undergraduate, and visiting students over 53 years. Ken collaborated with MIT colleagues (e.g., Morris Halle and Jay Keyser, Linguistics Dept.) and many researchers well beyond 77 Massachusetts Ave (e.g., Gunnar Fant, KTH, Sweden). His interest in how the physics of the vocal tract interacts with contrastive phonological categories unequivocally changed the field of Speech Communication, as well as the lives of his many students and collaborators who have gone on to establish their own laboratories and research programs.