Lila Ruth Gleitman (December 10, 1929 – August 8, 2021) was an American professor of psychology and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.
[6] Gleitman's research interests included language acquisition, morphology and syntactic structure, psycholinguistics, syntax, and construction of the lexicon.
[7] Notable former students include Elissa Newport, Barbara Landau, and Susan Goldin-Meadow.
The influence of Gleitman's research in language acquisition has been recognized by numerous organizations.
[14][15] Gleitman described her linguistic interests on the member page for the National Academy of Sciences: The New York Times noted that Gleitman built on work by linguist Noam Chomsky and "designed elegant experiments to show that syntax is hard-wired into the human brain".