Lise Menn


Lise Menn is an American linguist who specializes in psycholinguistics, including the study of language acquisition and aphasia. She is currently Professor Emerita of linguistics and was a fellow of the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder in Boulder, Colorado until her retirement in 2007.

Professional history

Menn earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1962 from Swarthmore College and a master's degree from Brandeis University in 1964. After changing fields, she earned a master's and doctorate in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975–6.
She taught or conducted research at several universities in the Boston area, including a post-doctoral position at MIT under Paula Menyuk and Kenneth N. Stevens, several years as a research associate with Jean Berko Gleason, and six years at the Aphasia Research Center of the Boston University School of Medicine under Harold Goodglass. She also spent a post-doctoral year with Eran Zaidel at UCLA, before being appointed associate professor of linguistics at the University of Colorado in 1986. Her approaches to linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics are considered to be 'bottom-up', empiricist, and functionalist.
She has been a member of the governing committees of the Academy of Aphasia, the Linguistic Society of America, and the Linguistics and Language Sciences section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2006, she was honored as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.
, Dr. Menn has written or edited nine books, and more than 50 peer-reviewed articles. Her doctoral advisees and co-advisees include Marjorie Perlman Lorch, Rebecca Burns-Hoffmann, Kevin Markey, Andrea Feldman, Patrick Juola, Harold Wilcox, Debra Biasca, Valerie Wallace, Carolyn J. Buck-Gengler, and Holly Krech Thomas.

Personal life

Dr. Menn was married to William Bright 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 and Joseph Menn and stepmother of Susie Bright.

Selected publications