Goldberg grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where her mother was a reading teacher and her father was an engineer.
Her brother,[1] Ken Y. Goldberg is chair of the industrial engineering and operations research department at the University of California, Berkeley,[2] and her sister, Elena is a pediatrician and child psychologist in Brooklyn.
She then transferred to linguistics to work with George Lakoff and earned her PhD in linguistics in 1992, studying with Lakoff, Eve Sweetser, Charles Fillmore, and Dan Slobin.
Her thesis argues that basic grammatical patterns in English are directly associated with meaning, offering one of the earliest arguments that constructions as well as words contribute to propositional content.
[5] Goldberg married Ali Yazdani, currently a professor of physics at Princeton, in 1994 and they have two children.