Sad news: Martha Burton

For those of you who have not  yet heard this terrible news ... Martha Burton, who made terrific contributions to psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, focusing on speech perception and spoken word recognition, died a few weeks ago, after recently being diagnosed with adenocarcinoma. Martha was a treasured colleague.   

Martha worked at Brown University, principally with Sheila Blumstein, and was then on the faculty at Penn State before moving to the Department of Neurology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. Both her psycholinguistic work -- see her important papers with her collaborator Sheila Blumstein -- and her neurolinguistic work using imaging  -- with Sheila as well as Steve Small -- is an example of enthusiastically embracing the new methodologies while never losing sight of the theory and the psycholinguistics. 

Martha published a series of papers in Brain and Language and the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience that everyone working in spoken language processing should read. It's awful that she died so suddenly, and so young.