She obtained a doctoral degree in philology in 1948 at the
University of Hamburg with a thesis on Old Norse, after which she taught at the
Baltic University in Exile. In 1949 she immigrated to the United States. She taught at
Kansas Wesleyan University and the
Detroit Institute of Technology, before beginning studies at the University of Michigan. She defended her second doctoral thesis – in
linguistics – in 1959 at the
University of Michigan. Her dissertation, "An acoustic-phonetic study of internal open juncture," was published as a special issue of
Phonetica (DOI:10.1159/000258062). After working at the University of Michigan Communication Sciences Laboratory as a research associate from 1959 to 1963, she joined the faculty of the Slavic Department of the
Ohio State University in 1963. She was a founding member and the first chair of the Linguistics Department at OSU, established in 1965. She remained at OSU as professor emerita after her retirement in 1987. Her main fields of research were
acoustic phonetics and
phonology,
prosody,
language contacts,
Estonian and
Serbo-Croatian. She was also interested in Estonian runic songs and, in collaboration with Jaan Ross, published several works on this topic (e.g., Ross & Lehiste 2001). During the Soviet occupation of Estonia, she helped to mediate research papers between Estonia and the free world. It was also thanks to her that the 11th
International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) in 1987 was arranged in
Tallinn. ==Honors and functions==