Jean Aitchison

Who is Jean Aitchison?

Jean Aitchison 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.

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.

Packaging: Entails understanding a word’s range of meaning.

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. London and New York: Routledge.

Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon. 3rd edition. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 2003.

Language Change: Progress or Decay? 3rd edition. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2001.