An Introduction to Language by Victoria A. Fromkin

įromkin created another constructed language for the vampires in the sci-fi movie Blade. Fromkin developed a 300-word vocabulary and syntax for the series, and translated scripts into her created Pakuni language for the series' first two seasons. In 1974, Fromkin was commissioned by the producers of the children's television series Land of the Lost to create a constructed language for a species of primitive cavemen/primates called the Pakuni. Fromkin published several papers about Genie's linguistic development, and her PhD student, Susan Curtiss, wrote a dissertation about Genie's linguistic development under Fromkin's supervision. However, the study ended after rancorous disputes over Genie's care, and the loss of funding from the National Institute of Mental Health.

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.

įrom 1971 to 1975, Fromkin was part of a team of linguistic researchers studying the speech of the ' feral child' known as Genie. She collected more than 12,000 examples of slips of the tongue, which were analyzed in a number of scholarly publications, notably her 1971 Language article and an edited volume, Speech Errors as Linguistic Evidence. Her line of research mainly dealt with speech errors and slips of the tongue. That same year, Fromkin joined the faculty of the linguistics department at UCLA. Her thesis was entitled, 'Some phonetic specifications of linguistic units: an electromyographic investigation'. She enrolled at UCLA, received her master's in 1963 and her Ph.D in 1965.

She decided to head back to school to study linguistics in her late thirties. She married Jack Fromkin, a childhood friend from Passaic, in 1948, and they settled in Los Angeles, California. She earned a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1944. Biography įromkin was born in Passaic, New Jersey as Victoria Alexandra Landish on May 16, 1923. She studied slips of the tongue, mishearing, and other speech errors, which she applied to phonology, the study of how the sounds of a language are organized in the mind. Victoria Alexandra Fromkin ( née Victoria Landish – January 19, 2000) was an American linguist who taught at UCLA. Some phonetic specifications of linguistic units: an electromyographic investigation (1965)

An Introduction to Language by Victoria A. Fromkin