Harlan Lawson Lane (August 19, 1936 – July 13, 2019) was an American psychologist.
Lane was the Matthews Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States, and founder of the Center for Research in Hearing, Speech, and Language.
His research was focused on speech, Deaf culture, and sign language.
Lane was born in Brooklyn, New York.
Remaining in New York City for college, he obtained both a B.S.
and an M.S.
in psychology from Columbia University in 1958.
He subsequently received a PhD in psychology from Harvard (1960) and a Doc.
des Lettres from the Sorbonne (1973).
In 1991, Lane received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.Lane, a hearing man, became an often controversial spokesman for the Deaf community and critic of cochlear implants.