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Lila Gleitman, whose pioneering work in linguistics and cognitive science broadened our understanding of how language works and how children learn, died August 8 at a Philadelphia hospital. He was 91 years old.

His daughter, Claire Gleitman, said the cause was a heart attack.

Until the 1970s, most linguists believed that the structure of language existed in the world and that the human brain learned it from infancy. Dr. Building on the work of his friend Noam Chomsky, Gleitman argued for the opposite: that the structures or syntax of language are innately brain-dependent, and that children already have a complex understanding of how they work.

Dr. “His primary scientific interest was the study of language acquisition, in a special sense: he created the field in its almost modern form and has led its impressive development ever since.” said in a statement.

Dr. Like Gleitman, who received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Chomsky devised the theory. But having found elegant ways to test it in the real world, starting with his own children, Dr. It was Gleitman.

He loved to tell a story about his daughter Claire, who was then 2 years old. One day, while Claire was in the car, Dr. Gleitman took a sharp turn and said, “Hold on tight.” “Isn’t it tight?” her daughter said immediately. she replied. The word showed how even a toddler can understand linguistic nuances without being taught to them.

Dr. Gleitman called the process “syntactic bootstrapping” – the use of an innate grasp of linguistic structure and its relation to meaning to come up with new words.

“The child really partially discovers what he knows from a complex code in which language is hidden” He said in a 2013 interview.

Dr. Gleitman often collaborated with her husband, psychologist Henry Gleitman, or with graduate students, many of whom became prominent linguists.

Together with Barbara Landau, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, she showed how even visually impaired children can learn “seeing” words like “look” and “see” not by experiencing them in the world, but by extracting their meaning from their syntax. and semantic contexts. He did similar research with another former student, Susan Goldin-Meadow, now at the University of Chicago, on deaf students.

Dr. “He believed that language learning was not just the accumulation of facts over time, it was also inherent in who we are as human beings,” Goldin-Meadow said in an interview.

Lila Ruth Lichtenberg was born on December 10, 1929 in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn. His father, Ben, was a structural engineer, and his mother, Fanny (Segal) Lichtenberg, was a housewife.

Lila attended James Madison High School, which educated the town’s generations of Jews. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Senators Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders, economists Gary Becker and Judith Sheindlin are best known as television’s Judge Judy.

He graduated from Antioch College in Ohio with a degree in literature in 1952 and moved to New York, where he got a job as an editorial assistant at the Journal of the American Water Works Association. A few years later she married Eugene Galanter, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and moved to Philadelphia. This marriage ended in divorce.

A professor at Swarthmore College at the time, Dr. She married Gleitman in 1958. Gleitman died in 2015. He is survived by his daughter Claire, another daughter, Ellen Luchette, and four grandchildren.

As his faculty wife, Dr. Gleitman was able to take classes at no cost and immersed himself in the classics. But he found his studies boring outside of Greek and Latin.

He entered a PhD in linguistics, studying under Zellig Harris, who was a pioneer in the computational study of language and analyzed its deep structures and logic. He also took a job at the East Pennsylvania Institute of Psychiatry; here part of her job involved writing psychology-related entries for the next edition of Webster’s Dictionary – including a vulgar term referring to sexual intercourse that had never been covered in the book before.

“I have forever considered this my greatest achievement in life,” he said. Dr. 2017 interview with Goldin-Meadow.

Dr. Despite being one of Harris’ best students, increasingly one of his leading aides and in the process of a fundamental break with his mentor, Dr. He was drawn to the work of Chomsky.

Human language did not exist separately from the human mind, he argued; rather it was something innate, innate, innate. Dr. Gleitman agreed, and likewise Dr. She broke up with Harris—a split so harsh that she refused to audit his dissertation.

Still, Dr. Gleitman received his doctorate in 1967 and began teaching at Swarthmore. He returned to the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and remained there until his retirement in 2002.

However, he did not stop working. In fact, the last two decades of his life were his most intellectually productive.

Working with a colleague, John Trueswell, he first examined how children learn “difficult” words (verbs, conceptual nouns), and then turned to look at how they learned concrete nouns and other “easy” words, which he argued were not so easy. as they appear.

Dr. Gleitman has continued to produce new works even in recent years, after his macular degeneration nearly left him blind. Dr. Trueswell said the last email she received from him came the day before she died. It was a short note that caught him in his latest article he had just submitted for publication.