Lise Menn

Professional history

Menn earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1962 from Swarthmore College and a master's degree (also in mathematics) from Brandeis University in 1964. After changing fields, she earned a master's, and later a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1976.

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, 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. She is Professor Emerita of linguistics and was a fellow of the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder in Boulder, Colorado until her retirement in 2007.

Her approaches to linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics are considered to be 'bottom-up' (i.e. data-driven), empiricist, and functionalist. As of 2014, she had written or edited nine books, and more than 50 peer-reviewed articles. Her most recent work as of 2025 was The Menn Phonetic Mini-Corpus: Articulatory Gestures as Precursors to the Emergence of Segments published in April 2021. It was co-written by Ann M. Peters and Yvan Rose. Her many doctoral advisees and co-advisees include Patrick Juola.