Lise Menn

Lise Menn (née Lise J. Waldman, born December 28, 1941, in Philadelphia) is an American linguist who specializes in psycholinguistics, including the study of language acquisition and aphasia. She is currently Professor Emerita of linguistics and a fellow of the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder in Boulder, Colorado.

Menn earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1962 from Swarthmore College and a master's degree (also in mathematics) 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. 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. Her approaches to linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics are considered to be 'bottom-up' (i.e. data-driven), empiricist, and functionalist.

As of 2014, Dr. Menn has written or edited nine books, and more than 50 peer-reviewed articles. In 2006, she was honored as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.

She is the mother of Stephen Menn and Joseph Menn and stepmother of Susie Bright. 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.

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.

• 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. [Parody]. 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 (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.