Lila Gleitman

Lila R. Gleitman was an American psycholinguist and cognitive scientist born December 10, 1929, in New York City, and died August 8, 2021, at age ninety one, who served as the Steven and Marcia Roth Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research was foundational to the study of language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, most notably her theory of syntactic bootstrapping, which proposes that children use the syntactic structure surrounding a word to infer aspects of its meaning; with Barbara Landau she also studied how blind children acquire spoken vocabulary tied to vision despite lacking visual experience. She received the David E. Rumelhart Prize in 2017, served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1993, and was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science; she was married to the psychologist Henry Gleitman until his death in 2015.