Victoria Fromkin
| Victoria Fromkin | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May 16, 1923 Passaic, New Jersey |
| Died | February 19, 2000 (aged 76) |
| Institutions | UCLA |
Victoria Fromkin (May 16, 1923 – January 19, 2000) was an American linguist who taught at UCLA. She studied slips of the tongue, mishearing, and other speech errors and applied this to phonology, the study of how the sounds of a language are organized in the mind.
Fromkin was born in Passaic, New Jersey as Victoria Alexandra Landish on May 16, 1923. She earned a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1944. She married Jack Fromkin, a childhood friend from Passaic, in 1948, and they settled in Los Angeles, California. Their son, Mark, was born in 1950 and died in a car accident in 1966.
Fromkin was active in the Communist Party USA, reaching positions of party leadership in California, but she resigned from membership shortly after the revelations of Stalinist crimes by Nikita Krushchev in 1956. She decided to head back to school to study linguistics in her late 30s. She enrolled at UCLA, received her master's in 1963 and her Ph.D in 1965; her thesis was entitled, "Some phonetic specifications of linguistic units: an electromyographic investigation".
That same year, Fromkin joined the faculty of the linguistics department at UCLA. Her line of research mainly dealt with speech errors and slips of the tongue. She collected more than 12,000 examples of slips of the tongue.
From 1971 to 1975, Fromkin was part of a team of linguistic researchers studying the speech of the "feral child" known as Genie. Genie had spent the first 13 years of her life in severe isolation, and Fromkin and her associates hoped that her case would illuminate the process of language acquisition after the critical period. However, the study ended after rancorous disputes over Genie's care, and the loss of funding from the National Institute of Mental Health. Fromkin published several papers about Genie's linguistic development.
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