If Noam Chomsky is considered the father of modern linguistics then his wife, linguist and education specialist Carol, could easily be thought of as the mother.
Carol Doris Schatz was born on July 1, 1930. She married Noam Chomsky at the age of 19, the two having known each other since they were children. In 1951, she earned a bachelor’s degree in French from the University of Pennsylvania. As Noam's political activism in opposition to the Vietnam War raised the possibility that he could end up serving jail time, she decided to set a trajectory for a professional career and attended Harvard University for her doctorate. Her dissertation was on early childhood language acquisition.
A nationally recognized leader in the attainment of spoken and written language, Professor Carol Chomsky is best known for her book “The Acquisition of Syntax in Children From 5 to 10.” The book was considered a landmark study in the field when it was published in 1969, as previously the scientific belief was that children complete their acquisition of syntax by the age of five.
Chomsky researched children’s indirect, developing awareness of the grammatical structure of their native language, and their ability to use that capability to pull meaning from increasingly complex sentences over time. Chomsky's research showed that children continue to develop the skills needed to understand complex constructions well beyond the age of five.
Her later research focused on how children acquired the written word. In the late 1970s, Chomsky developed a method called “repeated reading” to help struggling readers attain greater fluency. Children would read a text silently while a recording of the text was played and repeat the process until the text could be read fluently without the tape. The process has been used in classrooms ever since. Chomsky later turned her attention to educational technology, creating software that develops reading comprehension skills.
Chomsky was on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education from 1972 until her retirement in 1997. She died of cancer on December 19, 2008, at her home in Lexington, Massachusetts. She was 78 years old.