Dwight Robert Ladd Jr, FBA (born 5 March 1947), is a linguist and retired academic specialising in phonetics and phonology.
After spending two years in the US Army, he studied at Cornell University (1970–72) to complete a Master of Arts degree in linguistics.
After a year lecturing at the Heidelberg University, he returned to Cornell in 1975 to carry out doctoral studies, and was awarded his PhD in 1978 for his thesis "The structure of intonational meaning".
Ladd retired in 2011 and became an emeritus professor and honorary professorial fellow at Edinburgh.
[1][2][3] According to his British Academy profile, Ladd's research focuses on "phonology and phonetics, and the relation between them ('laboratory phonology')", as well as "intonation and prosody, including focus, emotion, pitch perception, tone languages, and links between language and music".