It is with profound sadness to report that Professor Lila Gleitman passed away August 8, 2021, at age 91. Lila was a leader in the developing field of cognitive science, and a guiding light to many in the field both personally and professionally. Please visit here and here for information on her life well lived.
Lila Gleitman was a linguist and psycholinguist whose work concerned the mental lexicon and its interface with syntax, language acquisition, and the relation between language and thought. One of her main interests concerned the architecture and semantic content of the mental lexicon, i.e., the psychological representation of the forms and meanings of words. Another major interest was in how children acquire both the lexicon and the syntactic structure of the native tongue.