Her first marriage to Eugene Galanter ended in divorce.[2]
She was married to fellow psychologist Henry Gleitman until his death on September 2, 2015. He also was a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. The Gleitmans had two daughters.[1] Lila Ruth Gleitman died on August 8, 2021, at the age of 91.[3]
Gleitman described her linguistic interests on the member page for the National Academy of Sciences:
One of my main interests concerns the architecture and semantic content of the mental lexicon, i.e., the psychological representation of the forms and meanings of words. My second major interest is in how children acquire both the lexicon and the syntactic structure of the native tongue.[8]
The New York Times noted that Gleitman built on work by linguist Noam Chomsky and "designed elegant experiments to show that syntax is hard-wired into the human brain".[2]
Shipley, E., Smith, C., & Gleitman, L. (1969). A study in the acquisition of language: Free responses to commands. Language, 45(2), 322–342.
Gleitman, L., & Gleitman H. (1970). Phrase and paraphrase. NY: Norton.
Newport, E., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L. (1977). Mother, I'd rather do it myself: Some effects and non-effects of maternal speech style. In C. Snow & C. Ferguson (Eds.), Talking to children: Language input and acquisition. NY: Cambridge University Press.
Landau, B., & Gleitman, L. (1985). Language and experience: Evidence from the blind child. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (Paperback published 1987)
Gleitman, L.R., & Reisberg, D. (2011). Language. Revised In H. Gleitman, D. Reisberg & M. Gross (Eds.), Psychology (8th ed.) [16]
Gleitman, L.R., Liberman, M.Y., McLemore, C. Partee, B.H. (January 2019). The Impossibility of Language Acquisition (and How They Do It). Annual Review of Linguistics.[17]