Janet Dean Fodor

Janet Dean Fodor was Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her primary field was psycholinguistics, and her research interests included human sentence processing, prosody, learnability theory and L1 (first-language) acquisition.

Dean Fodor grew up in England and received her BA in 1964 and her MA in 1966, both at Somerville. At Oxford, she was a student of the social psychologist Michael Argyle, and their ‘equilibrium hypothesis’ for nonverbal communication became the basis for affiliative conflict theory: if participants feel the degree of intimacy suggested by a channel of nonverbal communication to be too high, they act to reduce the intimacy conveyed through other channels.

Dean Fodor received her Ph.D. in 1970 from MIT with a thesis on the challenge posed by opaque contexts for semantic compositionality. She came to the Graduate Center at CUNY from the University of Connecticut in 1986 as a distinguished professor of linguistics. In 1988, Fodor founded the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Fodor supervised ca. 27 dissertations of students from both City University of New York and the University of Connecticut.

She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992, was made President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1997 and was named a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2006. In 2014, she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. A volume of papers in her honor, Explicit and Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing, was published in 2015. Professor Dean Fodor was married to the American philosopher Jerry Alan Fodor until his death in 2017.

Summary of major publications

A New Two-Stage Parsing Model
Fodor and Lyn Frazier proposed a new two-stage model of parsing human sentences and the syntactic analysis of these sentences. The first step of this new model is to “assign lexical and phrasal nodes to groups of words within the lexical string that is received”. The second step is to add higher nonterminal nodes and combines these newly created phrases into a sentence. Fodor and Frazier suggest this new method because it can transcend the complexities of language by parsing only a few words at a time. Their model is based on the assumption that initial parsing occurs via the length of the phrase, not the syntactic meaning.

Comprehending Sentence Structure
Through a series of sentence analyses, Fodor found that the “WH-trace appears in mental representations of sentence structure, but NP-trace does not”. WH-trace is the placement of interrogative words (who, what, where) in a sentence. Her findings did not support those of McElree, Bever, or MacDonald, but she acknowledges that there are different types of sentences that are going to create linguistic issues that linguists don’t know how to deal with yet. Using this same data, Fodor also finds that passive verbs are more memorable than adjectives during language production.

Psycholinguistics Cannot Escape Prosody
In this article, Fodor emphasizes the importance of integrating prosody into research on sentence processing. She argues that past research has focused on syntactic and semantic analysis of sentences, but people use prosody when reading, which affects reading comprehension and sentence analysis. She also brings up the idea that people use prosody when writing, not just reading, which further affects sentence production and sentence structure. She blames technology for this new need, largely because of the newfound availability of information.

Did you know? 

Janet Dean Fodor’s work with Lyn Frazier in the 70s and 80s did much to uncover the strong, perhaps universal, biases in the process of assigning hierarchical structure to linear sequences of words which is known today as ‘implicit prosody’?