Faculty
Kara Becker
Professor of Linguistics
B.A. 2003, M.A. 2003, Stanford University. Ph.D. 2010 New York University. Reed College 2010-.
Email | Website | Vollum 125
Teaching: Kara teaches about any and all social aspects of language, normally considered a subfield of linguistics called sociolinguistics. Sociolinguists take what we know about language from formal linguistics (how sounds, sentences, etc. are modeled in the brain and function for speakers of a language) and describe how it gets used by people in the real world. Topics ranging from the relationship between language and any social attribute (language and social class, language and gender, language and age, etc.), to regional differences in language, to language change, to marginalized languages (like African American English, or pidgin and creole languages), are all in the purview of sociolinguistics.
Research: Kara's research has focused on dialects of American English, whether regional or social. In particular, she has investigated the regional dialect of New York City, New York City English (NYCE), and how it has changed over time. She has worked on other American English dialects as well as social dialects of American English, in particular African American English (AAE). Her interests range from quantitative descriptions of dialects and their sociophonetic properties to the social meanings of dialect features, and how these features are used by individual speakers in social practice to agentically create aspects of identity.
Xiao Dong
Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistics
B.A. 2017, University of Jinan, M.A. 2021, M.S. 2026, and Ph.D. 2026, Indiana University Bloomington. Reed College 2026-.
Email | Eliot 114
Teaching: Xiao teaches courses in phonetics, second language phonetics and phonology, and introductory linguistics. Her teaching introduces students to how speech sounds are produced and perceived in both first- and second-language contexts, how sound systems are organized across languages, and how linguistic patterns can be analyzed using real-world language data.
Research: Xiao’s research focuses on phonetics, sociophonetics, and second language phonology, with a particular emphasis on Chinese languages. Her work combines acoustic analysis, sociolinguistic variation, and psycholinguistic methods to examine how speech sounds and prosody vary across speakers and communities, how listeners perceive and socially evaluate this variation, and how second-language learners acquire and process phonological patterns and alternations. Her current research investigates the acoustic properties of Mandarin neutral tone and its variation across speakers, communities, and language-learning contexts.
Sameer ud Dowla Khan
Professor of Linguistics - on sabbatical 2026-27
B.A. 2003, M.A. 2006, Ph.D. 2008 University of California, Los Angeles. Reed College 2012-.
Email | Website
Teaching: Every year, Sameer teaches phonetics and half of our introductory course on formal linguistics, both courses being open to students with no linguistics background. Every other year, they also teach courses on phonological theory, research topics in phonetics and phonology, intonation, field methods, methods of design and analysis, and South Asian languages.
Research: Sameer focuses on phonetics and phonology, meaning they're interested in the physical attributes of speech sounds, the complex patterns they form, and the abstract representations they embody in our mental grammars. Their primary research specializations are intonation (prosody) and voice quality (phonation). You can learn about Sameer's model of Bengali intonation, which they are currently expanding to cover the prosodically diverse languages of South Asia. They're also starting new research on sign languages of South Asia.
Matt Pearson
Professor of Linguistics - Chair
B.A. 1992 Reed College. M.A. 1996, Ph.D. 2000 University of California, Los Angeles. Reed College 2001-.
Email | Website | Vollum 313
Teaching: Matt teaches courses in a variety of subjects relating to formal analysis. His focus is on introductory and advanced syntax from a generative perspective, as well as grammatical description, cross-linguistic variation, and language universals. In addition, he regularly offers courses in morphology (and its interface with phonology and syntax), semantics (and its interface with syntax), and field methods. Matt has also taught courses in phonology, historical linguistics, and the structure of Austronesian languages.
Research: Matt's research focuses on the morpho-syntax of Malagasy (Merina dialect), an Austronesian language spoken on the island of Madagascar. Topics which he has investigated include word order variation; topic, focus, and the structure of the left periphery; argument structure and its relationship to verbal aspect and verb morphology; double object and applicative constructions; tense and aspect; and constraints on A-bar extraction.