Jean Aitchison (born Jean Margaret Aitchison, 3 July 1938)^[1] is a Professor of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Her main areas of interest include: Socio-historical linguistics; Language and mind; and Language and the media.

• Jean Aitchison Theory Of Language Change
• Jean Aitchison Theory Of Language Arts

Child Language Acquisition - Speech theories. Jean Aitchison (1987) Labelling. Linking labels to the objects which they refer to and understanding things can be labelled. Exploring labels and seeing what they can apply to. Over/under-extension occurs to eventually understand a range of meanings. Network Building. Metaphors used by Jean Aitchison regarding language change Learn with flashcards, games, and more — for free. Gender Theories of Language. Jean Aitchison Aitchison argues that there are no exact dates at which a child reaches a certain stage of learning language, that some children learn faster than others. She believes that the speed of learning is influenced by both innate abilities and environment. Jean Aitchison The internal and external history of language. Internal (PRESCRIPTIVIST) = formation of new words and the influence of dictionaries. Looks at what happens inside the language with no external influences.

Aitchison, Jean, 1938-Publication date 1992 Topics Linguistics. Language English. Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-215) and index Access-restricted-item. Functional theory - explains that language changes to meet new needs. Explains the use of archaisms and slang. Informalisation - the process whereby language forms that were traditionally reserved for close personal relationships are now used in wider social contexts.

Biography[edit]

Aitchison earned her MA from Cambridge, and an AM from Radcliffe College at Harvard. She was an assistant lecturer in Greek at Bedford College London from 1961-65, lecturer and senior lecturer, and reader in linguistics at the London School of Economics from 1965-92. She was the Rupert Murdoch Professor of language and communication at Oxford from 1993-2003, Professorial Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford from 1993-2003 (emeritus since 2003).^[2] In 1996 she gave the BBC Reith lectures on The Language Web.^[3] Professor Aitchison is a descendant of Sir Charles Umpherston Aitchison, lieutenant governor of the Punjab from 1882 to 1887 and founder of Aitchison College in Lahore, Pakistan.

Research[edit]

In 1987, Aitchison 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.

Key publications[edit]

• 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.^[4][5]
• 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.^[6]
• 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.)

References[edit]

1. ^'Birthdays'. The Guardian. Guardian Media. 3 July 2014. p. 33.
2. ^Debrett's People of Today http://www.debretts.com/people-of-today/profile/29538/Jean-Margaret-AITCHISON^{[permanent dead link]}
3. ^The Reith Lectures. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gmvwx
4. ^Review by: Richard Shillcock, Journal of Linguistics 24.2 (Sep., 1988), pp. 569-570.
5. ^Book Review by Lee Dembart, Well-Chosen Words on Linguistics :Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon by Jean Aitchison, The Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1988
6. ^EC Stewart, 1982, Book review-The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, Helmut Esau. Hornbeam Press (1980), Language Sciences, p. 360.

External links[edit]

Theories of Language Acquisition
Language is acquired very quickly in a child’s life. This speed of acquisition has influenced a number of schools of thought about the ways that children learn to communicate.

Noam Chomsky (1965)
Noam Chomsky is an American linguist who believes that learning takes pace through an innate brain mechanism which is pre-programmed with the ability to acquire grammatical structures. He calls it the Language Acquisition Device (LAD). Chomsky finds it significant that although human languages seem different the share many similarities which he describes as universal grammar.

Supporting this theory is evidence that children from all around the world develop at a similar rate in similar stages. All children can acquire complex grammar by an early age, regardless of their environment or intelligence does suggest an innate learning device. However, the actual nature of this has not been pinpointed.

Microsoft office upgrade for mac catalina. Alan Cruttenden (1974) compared adults and children to see if they could predict football results from listening to the score. He found that adults could successfully predict the winners by the intonation placed on the first team, but the children (up to the age of 7) were less accurate.

Categorising First Words

Jean Aitchison Theory Of Language Change

Katherine Nelson (1973) identified found four categories of first words:
• Naming
• Action/Events
• Describing/modifying things
• Personal/social words

60% were nouns. Verbs were the second largest group. Modifiers were third. Personal and social words made up 8% of the results. /understanding-viruses-teri-shors-pdf-free-download.html.

Aitchison’s Stages of Children’s Linguistic Development

Jean Aitchison Theory Of Language Arts

Jean Aitchison looked at the connections between children’s lexical and semantic development. These developmental stages are shown in the table on the next page. Once children expand their vocabulary they use network building to sort the words. An aspect of this stage is understanding hyponymy which occurs at around 18 months.

1 Labelling:Linking words to the objects to which they refer Understanding that objects can be labelled
2 Packaging: Exploring what labels can apply to. Over/under extension occurs in order to understand the range of a word’s meaning
3 Network Building: Making connections between words – understanding similarities and opposites in meanings

Piaget’s Stages of Children’s Linguistic Development – Cognitive Theory

• Sensorimotor
• Pre-operational
• Concrete operational
• Formal operational

Lev Vygotsky – Social Interactionist Theory

Vygotsky, an early child development researcher observed children’s play and linked it to both cognitive and social development. Young children often use props as pivots to support their play but when they get older they use their imagination instead. Vygotsky noticed how children role-play adult behaviour as part of exploring their environment.

Catherine Garvey’s study of pairs of children playing found that children adopt roles and identities, act out storylines and invent objects and settings as required in role-play scenarios. This is called “pretend play” and fulfils Halliday’s imaginative language function. Children play together because it is enjoyable, but it also practises social interaction and negotiation skills with roles and responsibilities often decided as they play. This is sometimes called “sociodramatic play” as it involves both social and dramatic skills, with clear rules and reflecting real world behaviour.

Sociodramatic play usually begins when the child is around four years old – possibly linked to their cognitive understanding of the different roles people have and how this affects their language. In their re-enactments they use subject specific lexis and structure them in some of the formulaic ways that adults use in real-life situations, suggesting they can observe and imitate adult behaviours.

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