Douglas H. Whalen is an American linguist

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 who is presently a program officer at the National Science Foundation

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

 where he is affiliated with the Cognitive Neuroscience

Cognitive neuroscience

Cognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological substrates underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes. It addresses the questions of how psychological/cognitive functions are produced by the brain...

, Documenting Endangered Languages

Endangered language

An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use. If it loses all its native speakers, it becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all it becomes an "extinct language"....

, and Linguistics programs. He is also the Vice President for Research and a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories

Haskins Laboratories

Haskins Laboratories is an independent, international, multidisciplinary community of researchers conducting basic research on spoken and written language. Founded in 1935 and located in New Haven, Connecticut since 1970, Haskins Laboratories is a private, non-profit research institute with a...

 where he studies from the motor theory of speech perception

Motor theory of speech perception

thumb|250px|right|When we hear [[speech|spoken words]] we sense that they are made of auditory [[sound]]s. The motor theory of speech perception argues that behind the sounds we hear are the intended movements of the [[vocal tract]] that [[pronunciation|pronounces]] them.The motor theory of speech...

 perspective the relationship between speech production and speech perception

Speech perception

Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonetics and phonology in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perception in psychology...

. He is also the President of the Endangered Language Fund

Endangered Language Fund

The Endangered Language Fund is a small non-profit organization based in New Haven, Connecticut. E.L.F. supports endangered language maintenance and documentation projects that aim to preserve the world’s languages while contributing rare linguistic data to the scientific...

 and a founding member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

Association for Laboratory Phonology

The Association for Laboratory Phonology is a non-profit professional society for researchers interested in the sound structure of language. It was founded to promote the scientific study of all aspects of phonetics and phonology of spoken and signed languages through scholarly exchange across...

. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

in linguistics.