Lila R. Gleitman


Lila Gleitman is a professor emerita of psychology and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an internationally renowned expert on language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, focusing on children's learning of their first language. Gleitman's research interests include, Language acquisition, morphology and syntactic structure, Psycholinguistics, syntax, and construction of the lexicon. Notable former students include Elissa Newport, Barbara Landau, and Susan Goldin-Meadow.

Personal life

She was married to fellow psychologist Henry Gleitman, who was also a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, until his death on September 2, 2015.

Professional career

Gleitman received a B.A. in literature from Antioch College in 1952, an M.A. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962, and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967. She was employed as an assistant professor at Swarthmore College before accepting a position as the William T. Carter Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania from 1972 to 1973, and then subsequently serving as a professor of linguistics and as the Steven and Marcia Roth Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1973 until her retirement.
The impact of Gleitman's research in language acquisition has been recognized by numerous organizations, and she has been elected as a fellow in the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. She won the David Rumelhart Prize in 2017 and also served as President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1993.
Gleitman herself describes her linguistic interests on the member page for the National Academy of Sciences below:
"One of my main interests concerns the architecture and semantic content of the mental lexicon, i.e., the psychological representation of the forms and meanings of words. My second major interest is in how children acquire both the lexicon and the syntactic structure of the native tongue."

Major publications