Janet Dean Fodor, a beloved member of the psycholinguistic community, was a brilliant teacher and generous mentor, supportive to everyone, above all those just beginning their careers. There was a characteristic polish and depth to everything she did, whether it was research on semantics and the possible interpretations of indefinites, learnability, studies of processing empty categories, or the role of implicit prosody in silent reading.

    Janet and David Swinney were the founders of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, now Human Sentence Processing (HSP). The basic conception for the conference came from Janet. She envisioned bringing together linguists, psychologists and computer scientists to form a community of individuals working on language processing.  From the outset, Janet knew this would require a format with a single plenary session where everyone heard the same talk and participated in a general discussion rather than parallel sessions likely to fragment along disciplinary lines. Her vision succeeded beyond anyone’s imagination thanks to her hard work and that of others at CUNY, most notably Dianne Bradley and Eva Fernandez.  Today this conference organizes the field of psycholinguistics in the US and beyond.

    I will miss Janet deeply as will many in our community.  But what a legacy she leaves behind.

- Lyn Frazier

Please also see Susan Fischer's obituary of Janet Fodor on the LSA website.