Arthur S. Abramson

Arthur S. Abramson was an American linguist, phonetician, and speech scientist born January 26, 1925, in Jersey City, New Jersey, and died December 15, 2017, at age ninety two. He founded and headed the linguistics department at the University of Connecticut from 1967 to 1974 while serving as a senior scientist and secretary of the board of directors at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven. He is best known for his research with colleague Leigh Lisker on voice onset timing, a measure describing the timing relationship between the release of a stop consonant and the onset of vocal fold vibration, developed through their landmark 1964 cross-language study of voicing in initial stops. He was also an authority on Southeast Asian languages, particularly Thai, publishing The Vowels and Tones of Standard Thai in 1962, and served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1983.