She earned her PhD in Linguistics in 1980 at MIT as a student of Morris Halle.
[2] She retired from her position as Professor of Linguistics at University College London (UCL) in 2009.
[3] While at UCL she also was co-director of the Centre for Human Communication[4] and Pro-Provost for China.
[5][6] Before taking up the position at UCL in 1999, she was Professor of Linguistics and Acting Dean at the University of California-Irvine (1992-1999) and Associate Professor at Brandeis University (1982-1992).
Her publications include papers on reduplication, morpho-phonology, prosodic phonology, and feature theory.