Lise Menn (née Lise J. Waldman, born December 28, 1941, in

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

) is an American

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

who specializes in

psycholinguistics Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind ...

, including the study of

language acquisition Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to ...

and

aphasia Aphasia is an inability to comprehend or formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions. The major causes are stroke and head trauma; prevalence is hard to determine but aphasia due to stroke is estimated to be 0.1–0.4% in th ...

. She is currently

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...

Emerita of linguistics and was a fellow of the Institute for Cognitive Science at the

University of Colorado at Boulder The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado sys ...

Boulder, Colorado Boulder is a home rule city that is the county seat and most populous municipality of Boulder County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 108,250 at the 2020 United States census, making it the 12th most populous city in Color ...

until her retirement in 2007.

Professional history

Menn earned a bachelor's degree in

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

in 1962 from

Swarthmore College Swarthmore College ( , ) is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1864, with its first classes held in 1869, Swarthmore is one of the earliest coeduca ...

and a master's degree (also in mathematics) from

Brandeis University , mottoeng = "Truth even unto its innermost parts" , established = , type = Private research university , accreditation = NECHE , president = Ronald D. Liebowitz , pro ...

in 1964. After changing fields, she earned a master's, and later a doctorate in linguistics from the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

in 1976. She taught or conducted research at several universities in the

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

area, including a post-doctoral position at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...

under

Paula Menyuk Paula Menyuk (1929 - 2020) was an American linguist known for her research in language development and disorders. She is one of the founders of the Boston University Conference on Language Development. At the time of her death, she was Professor ...

and

Kenneth N. Stevens Kenneth Noble Stevens (March 24, 1924 – August 19, 2013) was the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. Ste ...

, several years as a research associate with

Jean Berko Gleason Jean Berko Gleason (born 1931) is a psycholinguist and professor emerita in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University who has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of language acquisition in children, ...

, and six years at the Aphasia Research Center of the

Boston University School of Medicine The Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, formerly the Boston University School of Medicine, is one of the graduate schools of Boston University. Founded in 1848, the medical school was the first institution in the world ...

under

Harold Goodglass Harold Goodglass (August 18, 1920 – March 18, 2002) was a prominent pioneer of neuropsychological tests and assessment, and spent much of his career investigating aphasia. The Boston VA Hospital, where he spent many years investigating brain fu ...

. She also spent a post-doctoral year with Eran Zaidel at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

, before being appointed

associate professor Associate professor is an academic title with two principal meanings: in the North American system and that of the ''Commonwealth system''. Overview In the ''North American system'', used in the United States and many other countries, it is a ...

of linguistics at the University of Colorado in 1986. Her approaches to linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics are considered to be 'bottom-up' (i.e. data-driven), empiricist, and functionalist. She has been a member of the governing committees of the

Academy of Aphasia An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary or tertiary higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, f ...

, the

Linguistic Society of America The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...

, and the Linguistics and Language Sciences section of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respons ...

. In 2006, she was honored as a Fellow of the

. , Menn has written or edited nine books, and more than 50 peer-reviewed articles. Her many doctoral advisees and co-advisees include

Patrick Juola Patrick Juola is an internationally noted expert in text analysis, security, forensics, and stylometry. He is a professor of computer science at Duquesne University. As a faculty member at Duquesne University, he has authored two books and more t ...

Personal life

Menn was married to fellow linguist

William Bright William O. Bright (August 13, 1928 – October 15, 2006) was an American linguist and toponymist who specialized in Native American and South Asian languages and descriptive linguistics. Biography Bright earned a bachelor's degree in linguist ...

from 1986 until his death in 2006. Her first husband was Michael D. Menn; they were divorced in 1972. She is the mother of

Stephen Menn Stephen Menn (born 1964) is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University and, between 2011 and 2015, was Professor of Ancient and Contemporary Philosophy at Humboldt University of Berlin and the author of ''Descartes and Augustine'' about the ori ...

and

Joseph Menn A fatal system error (also known as a system crash, stop error, kernel error, or bug check) occurs when an operating system halts because it has reached a condition where it can no longer operate safely (''i.e.'' where critical data could be l ...

, and stepmother of

Susie Bright Susannah Bright (born March 25, 1958) is an American feminist, author, journalist, critic, editor, publisher, producer, and performer, often on the subject of politics and sexuality. She is the recipient of the 2017 Humanist Feminist Award, and ...

Selected publications

*On the acquisition of phonology, by Paul Kiparsky & Lise Menn. In John Macnamara (ed.), Language Learning and Thought. New York: Academic Press (1977), pp. 47–78. Reprinted in G. Ioup & S. H. Weinberger (eds.), Interlanguage Phonology: The Acquisition of a Second Language Sound System. Cambridge, MA: Newbury House (1987), pp. 23–52. * Elvish loanwords in Indo-European: Cultural implications. arody In J. Allan (ed.), An Introduction to Elvish. Somerset: Bran's Head Books Ltd. (1978), pp. 143–151. Book reprinted 1995. * Fundamental frequency and discourse structure, by Lise Menn & Suzanne Boyce. Language and Speech 25.341–383 (1982). *Development of articulatory, phonetic, and phonological capabilities. In

Brian Butterworth Brian Lewis Butterworth FBA (born 3 January 1944) is emeritus professor of cognitive neuropsychology in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, England. His research has ranged from speech errors and pauses, shor ...

(ed.), Language Production, vol. 2. London: Academic Press (1983), pp. 3–50. * Contrasting cases of Italian agrammatic aphasia without comprehension disorder, by Gabriele Miceli, Anna Mazzucchi, Lise Menn, & Harold Goodglass. Brain and Language 19.65–97 (1983). * False starts and filler syllables: Ways to learn grammatical morphemes, by Ann M. Peters & Lise Menn). Language 69:4 (1993). pp. 742–777. * "Non-Fluent Aphasia in a Multilingual World" (Studies in Speech Pathology and Clinical Linguistics, Vol 5) by Lise Menn, M. O'Connor, Loraine K. Obler, and Audrey Holland. (1996). John Benjamins. * "Phonological Development: Models, Research, Implications (Communicating By Language)" by Charles A. Ferguson, Lise Menn, and Carol Stoel-Gammon. (1992). York Press. * A linguistic communication measure for aphasic narratives, by Lise Menn, Gail Ramsberger, & Nancy Helm-Estabrooks. Aphasiology 8:343–359. (1994). * "Methods for Studying Language Production" by Lise Menn and Nan Bernstein Ratner. (2000). Lawrence Erlbaum. * "Agrammatic Aphasia: A Cross-Language Narrative Sourcebook", edited by Lise Menn and Loraine K. Obler. (1990). John Benjamins.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Menn, Lise 1941 births Living people Linguists from the United States Developmental psycholinguists Swarthmore College alumni Brandeis University alumni University of Illinois alumni University of Colorado faculty Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America Women linguists