Carol Doris Chomsky (; July 1, 1930December 19, 2008) was an American

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

and education specialist who studied

language acquisition Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language. In other words, it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language, to understand it, and to produce and use words and s ...

in children.

Early life

Carol Doris Schatz was born in

Philadelphia Philadelphia ( ), colloquially referred to as Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania, most populous city in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and the List of United States cities by population, sixth-most populous city in the Unit ...

on July 1, 1930. She married

Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a ...

in 1949 with the two having known each other since she was five years old and he was seven. Her mother had been a teacher at a Hebrew school where his father was the principal.Marquard, Bryan
"Carol Chomsky; at 78; Harvard language professor was wife of MIT linguist"
''

The Boston Globe ''The Boston Globe,'' also known locally as ''the Globe'', is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes. ''The Boston Globe'' is the oldest and largest daily new ...

'', December 20, 2008. Accessed December 20, 2008
Archived
from the original on December 23, 2008. She was awarded a bachelor's degree in French from the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

in 1951. The couple spent time living in HaZore'a, a

kibbutz A kibbutz ( / , ; : kibbutzim / ) is an intentional community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. The first kibbutz, established in 1910, was Degania Alef, Degania. Today, farming has been partly supplanted by other economi ...

Israel Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in West Asia. It Borders of Israel, shares borders with Lebanon to the north, Syria to the north-east, Jordan to the east, Egypt to the south-west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. Isr ...

. Although enjoying themselves, Noam Chomsky was appalled by the Jewish nationalism and anti-Arab racism that he encountered in the country, as well as the pro-Stalinist trend that he thought pervaded the kibbutz's leftist community. "It also was way before there were even words about women's rights" according to Judith Chomsky, wife of Noam Chomsky's younger brother. Despite Carol's interest in becoming a mechanic or driving a tractor at the time of the young couple's stay in 1953, they returned to the United States.

Career

She earned a doctoral degree in linguistics from

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

in 1968, having attended the school in order to ensure that she would be able to make a living in the event that her husband were sent to jail for his active opposition to the Vietnam War. Chomsky's best-known book is ''The Acquisition of Syntax in Children From 5 to 10'' (1969). The book investigated how children develop an understanding of the underlying grammatical structure of their native language, as well as how they use this skill to interpret sentences of increasing complexity as they get older. Despite earlier scientific beliefs that children complete their acquisition of

syntax In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituenc ...

by the age of five, Chomsky's research showed that children continue to develop the skills needed to understand complex constructions beyond that age. As part of her research to understand how children develop the ability to read, she developed a method in the late 1970s called repeated reading, in which children would read a text silently while a recording of the text was played. The child would repeat the process until the text could be read fluently without the tape. Research showed that four readings accompanied by a recording could be enough to provide added reading fluency for most children. More than 100 studies have been performed on the technique, with most finding statistically significant improvements in reading speed and word recognition.Farstrup, Alan E.; and Samuels, S. Jay
"What Research Has to Say about Reading Instruction"
via

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, p. 177 ff. International Reading Associates, 2002. . Accessed December 20, 2008. She served on the faculty of the

Harvard Graduate School of Education The Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) is the education school of Harvard University, a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1920, it was the first school to grant the EdD degree and the first ...

from 1972 until 1997.

Death

Chomsky died of cancer on December 19, 2008, at her home in

Lexington, Massachusetts Lexington is a suburban town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, located 10 miles (16 km) from Downtown Boston. The population was 34,454 as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. The area was originally inhabited by ...

. She was 78 years old.

Publications

* ''The acquisition of syntax in children from 5 to 10'', 1968 * ''Imparare la sintassi : uno studio con bambini di scuola elementare'', 1978 * ''M-ss-ng l-nks : young people's literature'', 1982 * ''M-ss-ng l-nks : a game of letters and language'', 1983 * ''M-ss-ng l-nks : classics old and new'', 1983 * ''M-ss-ng l-nks : microencyclopedia'', 1984

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chomsky, Carol 1930 births 2008 deaths American educational theorists American expatriates in Israel Deaths from cancer in Massachusetts Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni Harvard Graduate School of Education faculty Jewish American social scientists People from Lexington, Massachusetts Scientists from Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania alumni Carol American women linguists Writers from Philadelphia American women non-fiction writers 20th-century American linguists 21st-century American women