- Jean Aitchison
Jean Aitchison is a Professor of
Language andCommunication in the Faculty ofEnglish Language andLiterature at theUniversity of Oxford and a Fellow ofWorcester College, Oxford .In 1987, she identified three stages that occur during a child's acquisition of vocabulary: labelling, packaging and network building.
1: Labelling: First stage and involves making the link between the sounds of particular words and the objects to which they refer e.g. understanding that “mummy” refers to the child’s mother.
2:Packaging: Entails understanding a word’s range of meaning.
3: Network Building: Involves grasping the connections between words: understanding that some words are opposite in meaning.E.g: understanding the relationship between hypernyms and hyponyms. :
Her main areas of interest include
*Socio-historical linguistics
*Language and mind
*Language and the mediaHer main published books include
*"New Media Language" (edited with Diana M. Lewis). London and New York.: Routledge.*"Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon". 3rd edition (1st edition 1987). Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 2003.
*"Language Change: Progress or Decay?" 3rd edition (1st edition 1981). Cambridge, New York, Melbourne:
Cambridge University Press , 2001.*"The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics". 4th edition (1st edition 1976). London and New York: Routledge, 1998.
*"The language Web: The Power and Problem of Words". 1996 BBC Reith lectures. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne:
Cambridge University Press , 1997.*"The Seeds of Speech: Language Origin and Evolution". Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996. (Also, with new extended introduction, in C.U.P. Canto series, 2000.)
External links
* [http://users.ox.ac.uk/~aitchiso/ Homepage of Jean Aichison]
created diary of a working child
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