Wendy Herd,
Assistant Professor

Contact:

Lee Hall, Room 315F
Department of English
P.O. Box E
Mississippi State, MS   39762
wjh159@msstate.edu

Wendy Herd

 

 

 

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.