Carol Chomsky - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Carol Chomsky (July 1, 1930-December 19, 2008) was an American linguist and education specialist.^[1]

Chomsky was a linguist and education specialist.^[1] She wrote the book, The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from 5 to 10 in 1969.^[1] She focused on how hearing language helped children develop language skills. ^[2] She explained how older kids learn different syntactic structures, meaning how they learn to arrange words and phrases in a specific order.^[2] Chomsky found that children develop a lot of syntactic understanding after the age of five, when they enter school.^[2] However, most of the understanding comes from hearing and using language, not from studying it in school.^[2]

In the late 1970s, she experimented on repeated reading as a way for children to learn.^[2] She found that the more often adults read to a child, and the more complex the text they read was, the better the child's language development was, too.^[2] She focused on making software that helps with skills like reading comprehension.^[1]

Chomsky also studied how children learn spelling.^[3] In order for children to get better at reading and spelling, they need to learn that words might be related, even if they sound different from each other. Learning what words are related will make understanding and spelling words easier. Learning to look for patterns in words as we read is even more important. So, even though the "c" in medicine sounds like "s," but sounds like "k" in medication, recognizing that the words are related – and that we can recognize other related words, too, is important to developing language skills.^[3]

She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree in French.^[2] She received a linguistics Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1968.^[1] Chomsky then worked at Harvard Graduate School of Education from 1972 to 1997.^[1]

She was born in Philadelphia, USA.^[1] She married her husband, Noam Chomsky in 1949.^[2] They both studied linguistics. They each studied a different kind of linguistics. Noam Chompsky was about to be jailed in the 1960s.^[1] Carol Chomsky then decided to continue her education by studying for a Ph. D. at Harvard.^[1]

She passed away from cancer in 2008.^[1]