Jean Aitchison

Jean Aitchison (born Jean Margaret Aitchison, 3 July 1938) 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.

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 media

Her 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

• Jean Aitchison homepage