Sproat graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985, under the supervision of Kenneth L. Hale.[3] His PhD thesis is one of the earliest work that derives morphosyntactically complex forms from the module which produces the phonological form that realizes these morpho-syntactic expressions, one of the core ideas in Distributed Morphology.[4]
One of Sproat's main contributions to computational linguistics is in the field of text normalization, where his work with colleagues in 2001, Normalization of non-standard words,[5] was considered a seminal work in formalizing this component of speech synthesis systems.
He has also worked on computational morphology[6] and the computational analysis of writing systems.[7]