Dylan Herrick, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2003 and joined the Modern Languages faculty in 2006. Prior to OU, he spent two years at Mie University (Japan) and one year at Pomona College.

His research specialization is theoretical phonology and the phonetics-phonology interface, and he has done extensive work on Catalan dialects (spoken in and around the Barcelona area). Recently, he has begun to study aspects of the Comanche sound system, and he is interested in learning more about other Native American languages. Publications include:

-----2008.   “An acoustic description of Central Catalan vowels based on real and nonsense word data.”  Catalan Review XXI.

-----2007. “Eastern Catalan vowel reduction is characterized by raising – not centralization.” Studies in Language Sciences 6. Nagoya: Kurosio Publishers.

-----2006. “Mid vowels and schwa in Eastern Catalan: five non-Barcelona dialects.” In Jean-Pierre Montreuil (Ed.), New perspectives on Romance Linguistics. The Netherlands: John Benjamins.

-----2005. “Examining perceptual distance in phonological vowel reduction.” In Yukio Otsu (Ed.), The Proceedings of the Sixth Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics. Tokyo: Hitsuji Shobo.

Dr. Herrick teaches General Linguistics, Phonetics, Phonology, Phonetic Field Methods, Historical Linguistics, and the Linguistics Capstone course. He enjoys his teaching and tries his best to employ (some variant of) the Socratic method in his classes. He says, "I feel my most successful as a teacher when my students explain the answers to a particular problem to me, and I feel my worst when I have to explain the answer to them."