A student of Zellig Harris, with whom he wrote "The phonemes of Kingwana-Swahili" in 1942, Lukoff received his bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1947, his master's from the same institution in 1948, and his doctorate, also from Penn, in 1954. After receiving his Ph.D., he joined the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics the same year as Noam Chomsky[1] to work on machine translation under Victor Yngve, where, in 1956, he wrote a seminal paper on generative phonology, "On accent and juncture in English," with Chomsky and Morris Halle.[1] He taught at Yonsei University in Seoul for the next seven years, and spent the rest of his career at the University of Washington in Seattle until his retirement in 1989.[2]