Lynne Ann Werner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The oldest of seven children, she describes her childhood as “unremarkable.”. She received her bachelor's degree from Northwestern University. Having sampled majors in biology, chemistry, education and anthropology, she finally settled on psychology.  

Following graduation, Lynne stayed in the Chicago area and began graduate school at Loyola University of Chicago, in the lab of Debbie Holmes, a developmental psychologist working mostly on visual perceptual development.  In the Holmes lab she started her lifelong adventure toward discovering what human infants hear, completing a dissertation entitled “Auditory frequency analysis in infancy” in addition to several other papers on visual attention and a neurophysiology study on the goldfish 8^th nerve with Richard Fay.  Lynne then took a position as Assistant Professor of Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University. Soon after that she was enticed to move her lab to the University of Virginia, and then in 1986 she moved to the University of Washington where she rapidly rose to Full Professor with Tenure. She officially retired and became Professor Emeritus in 2017, but still continues to mentor junior scientists and to collaborate on research in other labs.