After changing fields, she earned a master's, and later a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1976.
[1] 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,[2] 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 postdoctoral year with Eran Zaidel at UCLA, before being appointed associate professor of linguistics at the University of Colorado in 1986.
[3] Her approaches to linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics are considered to be 'bottom-up' (i.e. data-driven), empiricist, and functionalist.
Menn 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.