Lila Gleitman
Also known as Lila R. Gleitman, Lila Ruth Lichtenberg
Lila Gleitman was a professor of psychology and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania who studied language acquisition. Her theory of syntactic bootstrapping holds that children work out word meanings from the sentence structures the words appear in. In 1991 she co-founded Penn's Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, which became a model for promoting interaction between psychology, linguistics and computer science. She won the David Rumelhart Prize in 2017 for her theories of language acquisition. She died in 2021 at age 91.
- Works
- 175
- Citations
- 15,819
- h-index
- 49
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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1952–1967
Antioch, then Penn
She earned a B.A. in literature from Antioch College in 1952. At the University of Pennsylvania, she completed a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1967.
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1972–1973
Joining Penn's faculty
After working as an assistant professor at Swarthmore College, she became William T. Carter Professor of Education at Penn from 1972 to 1973. She was also a professor of psychology and linguistics at Penn.
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1991–2001
An institute across disciplines
In 1991 she co-founded Penn's Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, which she co-directed until 2001. Under her leadership, the institute became a model for promoting interaction between psychology, linguistics and computer science.
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1993
Linguistic Society president
She served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1993.
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2000
National Academy membership
Membership in the National Academy of Sciences dates to 2000.
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2017
Sentence structure as a clue
In 2017 she won the David E. Rumelhart Prize for theories of language acquisition, notably syntactic bootstrapping. In that theory, children infer word meanings from the syntactic contexts in which the words appear.
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2021
Death at 91
She died on August 8, 2021, at age 91. She was still working on books and papers with several collaborators when she died.
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2023
A prize named for her
In 2023 the Cognitive Science Society and the Society for Language Development set up the Lila R. Gleitman Prize for Early-Career Contributions to Cognitive Science. The recipient is an early-career woman in cognitive science.
Sources and credits
Photo: web.sas.upenn.edu; Lila Gleitman – The Language Learning Lab; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: web.sas.upenn.edu. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.