My dad said I should be a doctor, but that sounded like hard work, so I married one instead.
Seriously though, Laura was an exceptionally smart person. She was a straight A student in HS and college, where she earned a BS in Mathematics, but she also enjoyed science, language, psychology, and the whole learning process. And when it came time decide what to pursue in grad school, she famously made a decision in the shower: Linguistics is the combination of all those things, and it has the added bonus of being a fairly new field, compared to other sciences, and so there’s lots of room for discovery.
She started at the University of AZ and while visiting UCONN for a semester, decided to make the move permanent. UCONN’s department was run by a linguist who had studied with Noam Chomsky, the father of modern mainstream linguistics. Part of her studies here included weekly trips with other students to sit in on Chomsky’s lectures at MIT. She studied semantics and child language acquisition (how the brain learns language) and earned her Masters, and then her PhD. Her dissertation, Excavating Semantics, examined the theory and acquisition of discourse-bound pronouns, developing ideas of dynamic binding.
Yeah, I don’t know what that means either, I copied from the departments website. But I went to her dissertation defense and she kicked if off by presenting an orange and warning the scientific community that the brain was similar and while you can make assumptions about what’s inside based on what you see outside (texture, color, structure, etc.), it may not actually work that way. She peeled open the orange to show how different it was on the inside and proceeded to eat the slices while delivering her presentation. She was effectively saying, we have such limited info, let’s leave room for the possibility that we could be wrong. I thought that was incredibly brave of her.
She went on to work at Yale Medical School and then Haskins Laboratories as a researcher, publishing papers with Don Shankweiler and other colleagues on language processing, the effects of stroke on language production and what that can tell us about the brain and it’s capability for language, and eye movement as it pertains to reading language.
Her final project was to generate the index to Language and life: Haskins Laboratories’ first half century, which came out this past summer. Donald recruited her to the project (if I may paraphrase) because her breadth of knowledge on the expansive subject matter made her the ideal person to understand what should and shouldn’t be cross referenced, and when certain concepts and ideas were referenced at various points using different terminology, someone had to know the material well enough to know they were the same thing. It was a monumental project, and she applied the same level of effort and expertise to it, as she had every other endeavor she attempted. I’ve always been extremely proud of her academic work, and grateful for the exposure to her intellect and the benefits that it brought to my life and our family.