A Life in Linguistics and Communication Disorders: An Interview with Christiane Baltaxe

Abstract

A Life in Linguistics and Communication Disorders: An Interview with Christiane Baltaxe Emmy Goldknopf University of California, Los Angeles Dr. Christiane Baltaxe has been a pioneer in work on language and com- munication in autism as well as in work on communication disorders and psychiatric conditions more generally. Born in an area which was then part of Gennany, Dr. Baltaxe first trained in Europe as a translator and then immigrated to the United States. She wrote her own undergraduate linguistics program at UCLA and then did her Ph.D. in the newly created linguistics department. Dr. Baltaxe's wide-ranging studies in linguistics at UCLA, including work on historical linguistics, computer linguistics, and linguistic anthropology, influenced her later work on communication disorders. Her dissertation focused on the history and development of distinctive feature analysis; she also translated Trubetskoy's Grundziige del' Fonology 'Prin- ciples of Phonology' into English. After doing postdoctoral work at UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute (NPI), Dr. Baltaxe joined the faculty there and also became licensed as a speech pathologist. In her research, she has employed qualitative techniques such as cohesion analysis as well as quantitative experimental techniques. In addition to doing research, teaching, and clinical work, she founded the NPI's Department of Communication Disorders and developed the communication disorders component of the NPl's Interdisciplinary Program in Developmental Disabilities which for many years promoted communication among different disciplines at the hospital. Over the years, she has mentored many people, including postdoctoral students and graduate students in linguistics, applied linguistics, and other disciplines, as well as speech pathologists. She recently retired from the faculty at the NPI, but continues to see patients and do research there. Emmy: Can you tell me about your early life? Chris: I was born in eastern Gennany.! My mother was Gennan, my father was French-actually Belgian, but he spoke French. And when I was a young kid he would go for a walk with me or he would take me on his bike and point certain things out in French. So I already had some notion that there are other languages around, in an environment where this was not a common thing. The.n he was miss- ing in the war. I had three siblings. I was the oldest and we had to leave our place because the Russian front was coming. So when I was about ten years old we fled to western Gennany-to Bavaria. We were refugees. This was in February of '45. We ended up in a refugee camp and then we were distributed among the popula- Issues in Applied Linguistics © 2002/2003, Regents of the University of California ISSN 1050-4273 Vol. 13 No.2, 187-201