Lise Menn

Lise Menn (née Lise J. Waldman, born December 28, 1941, in Philadelphia) is an American linguist who specializes in psycholinguistics, including the study of language acquisition and aphasia. She is currently Professor Emerita of linguistics and a fellow of the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder in Boulder, Colorado.

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 doctorate in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975–6.

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 post-doctoral year with Eran Zaidel at UCLA, before being appointed associate professor of linguistics at the University of Colorado in 1986. She 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. Her approaches to linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics are considered to be 'bottom-up' (i.e. data-driven), empiricist, and functionalist.