Andrea Levitt is professor of French and Linguistics at Wellesley College. Professor Levitt served as associate dean of the college from 1999 until 2004. In this role, she focused primarily on faculty issues, serving as a member of the Committees on Faculty Appointments, Faculty Benefits and Faculty Awards. In addition, she served, along with her colleagues Dean Lee Cuba and Associate Dean Andy Shennan, as the primary contact in the Dean's Office for about a third of the college's departments and programs. She oversaw the Office of Institutional Research and the Quantitative Reasoning Program and chaired the Ruhlman Committee, which is responsible for organizing the annual Ruhlman Conference.
A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Professor Levitt received her B.A. degree (magna cum laude with honors in French) from Wellesley College in 1971. A recipient of a Yale University Fellowship and the Horton-Hallowell Fellowship for graduate study, Professor Levitt earned her Ph.D. in linguistics from Yale University in 1977.
Professor Levitt has published numerous articles on speech perception and production in children and adults. Her current work centers on the ability of infants to discriminate speech sounds and the age at which infants' vocal productions begin to reflect the speech patterns of the adult speakers around them. She is also interested in the acquisition of speech sounds and native-like prosody by second-language learners. Both the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and NATO have provided support for her work. Professor Levitt has been a regular visiting researcher at Yale University's Haskins Laboratories, a center for the study of speech and reading.
A member of the Wellesley faculty since 1976, Professor Levitt was chair of the French department from 1995-1998. She will be serving as chair again from 2007 through 2011. She directed the Language Studies Program since its inception until 1999 and has also occasionally served as director of the Cognitive Science Program. She teaches a variety of linguistics courses, including courses on sociolinguistics and bilingualism. She was one of three recipients of the Samuel and Anna Pinanski Teaching Prize for 1998-1999, and in 1999, she was named Margaret Clapp '30 Distinguished Alumna Professor of Linguistics and French.
Profile last updated: 8/08