Professional Bio
Wendy Herd is a linguist who specializes in phonetics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and second language acquisition. She uses experimental methods in order to investigate the perception and production of sounds in speakers’ first and second languages. Her current research focuses on category formation, a fundamental cognitive process, in adult second language learners. This research addresses whether adults can be trained to establish new non-native phonemic categories and whether training in one modality (i.e., perception) can be transferred to another (i.e., production). She is currently writing up her research on the use of high variability training in combination with phonetic, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic tasks to determine whether English learners of Spanish can improve their perception and production of intervocalic /d/, tap, and trill. She is also setting up a phonetics and psycholinguistics lab, which will allow her to investigate topics such as the perception of taps by preliterate speakers of American English and the perception of foreign-accented speech by monolingual and bilingual speakers of English.
Education
Ph.D. 2011 University of Kansas
M.A. 2007 University of Kansas
M.A. 2004 Missouri State University
B.A. 1995 University of Missouri
Teaching interests:
Linguistics, phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, second language acquisition, research methods in linguistics
Courses taught:
Methods in TESOL
Studies in Second Language Acquisition
Refereed Publications:
Herd, W., Jongman, A., & Sereno, J. (2010). An acoustic and perceptual analysis of /t/ and /d/ flaps in American English. Journal of Phonetics, 38 (4), 504 – 16.
Jongman, A., Herd, W., Al-Masri, M., Sereno, J., & Combest, S. (2011). Acoustics and perception of emphasis in Urban Jordanian Arabic. Journal of Phonetics, 39 (1), 85 – 95.
