Biography
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.
In 1974, Fromkin was commissioned by the producers of the children's television series Land of the Lost to create a language for a species of primitive cavemen/primates called the Pakuni. 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.
She became the first woman in the University of California system to be Vice Chancellor of Graduate Programs. She held this position from 1980 to 1989. She was elected President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1985. Fromkin was also chairwoman of the board of governors of the Academy of Aphasia. Fromkin was awarded the UCLA Harvey L. Eby Award. She was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1996, an honor she hailed as "Good for linguistics, good for UCLA, and good for the Jews."
Fromkin died at the age of 76 on January 19, 2000 from colon cancer.
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