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Introduction
Introduction
The name ‘Chomsky’ has dominated academic and public domains for decades. Often referred to as the “Father of Modern Linguistics”, Chomsky’s work helped establish Linguistics as an academic discipline in its own right and continues to influence the field today. Beyond linguistics, Chomsky has emerged as a public intellectual for his writings on political theory, philosophy, and cognitive science, among other fields of study. Linguistic research and theory have developed since Chomsky came to prominence in the mid-century, and while not all of his original theories can be supported, his work has cast a long shadow over the field. As an undergraduate student of Linguistics, Chomsky's name and theories have formed the foundation of my education. Therefore, I was shocked and intrigued to learn that there is another Chomsky that left an indelible mark in linguistic research: Dr. Carol Chomsky (nee Schatz), a Linguist and Education Specialist that focused on Child language Acquisition and also happened to be Noam Chomsky’s wife of approximately 59 years. When reading about Dr. Chomsky's work I questioned why I had never heard her name before. She researched and contributed to the field during the same period as her husband. Moreover, Carol Chomsky was educated and mentored by a pioneer of Linguistics, mirroring her husband's prestigious academic lineage. Furthermore, her research on Child Language Acquisition overlapped and at times contradicted many of the theories that brought her husband infamy in this field, yet few seem to know her name. Academics are so focused on Noam Chomsky’s impact on linguistics, but I question to what extent she could have influenced him. Moreover, does her neglect speak to a larger trend of excluding women’s contributions to Linguistics from our canon? Why is no one talking about her? In the following article, I hope to shine a light on Dr. Chomsky’s work and legacy in Linguistics and further discuss how she became so overlooked.
Who Is Carol Chomsky?
Who Is Carol Chomsky?
Carol Schatz was born July 1, 1930, in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, and was a childhood friend of Noam Chomsky whom she married in 1949. Initially completing an undergraduate degree in French from the University of Pennsylvania, Carol entered the field of Linguistics in the 1960s as a means to support herself in the face of her husband's potential arrest due to his political activism. In 1968 Carol completed a doctorate of Linguistics from Harvard University, under the supervision of Roman Jacobson, a celebrated 20th-century linguist, noted for his contributions to the area of Phonology. Operating during a time when the Generativist approach dominated Linguistics, Carol’s research was rooted in psycholinguistic theory and focused on how children develop language and its implications in an educational setting. Dr. Chomsky is noted for prioritizing children’s comprehension of language rather than production, with a special interest in children acquiring the ability to read. Despite being married to Noam Chomsky, a prolific generativist, Carol Chomsky’s work often challenged many of her husband's ideas regarding child language acquisition. During a time when there was a larger distinction between psycholinguistic endeavors and linguistics arguments, Carol Chomsky’s work often challenged long-held linguistic ‘truths’ by implementing empirical methods and collecting data on children’s actual language comprehension. In contrast to her husband̓s approach to linguistics, which was rooted in theory and abstract areas of language, Carol Chomsky’s work focused on language in practice. Below I summarize two of Dr. Carol Chomsky’s contributions to linguistic research.
The Acquisition of Syntax In Children from 5 to 10
The Acquisition of Syntax In Children from 5 to 10
Dr. Chomsky is noted for her doctoral dissertation entitled “The Acquisition of Syntax In Children from 5 to 10” (later revised and published as a book in 1969) which examined children’s ability to comprehend syntactically complex phrases. At its time of publication, this study was considered an important contribution to the field because it challenged the notion that by the age of four children have fully grasped the syntax of their mother tongue, a belief supported by Noam Chomsky. In this study, she anticipated that younger children (ages 5-7 years old) would struggle to understand phrases with unmarked syntactic relationships or phrases that are exceptional to a common English syntactic rule. Using dolls and other children to create scenarios to test children’s comprehension, Dr, Chomsky found that young children often made mistakes in understanding complex syntactic phrases, while older children correctly understood each test phrase. Contrary to popular belief at the time, this study provided evidence that children needed more time to develop the skills needed to grasp syntactically complex phrases.
Contributions to Education
Contributions to Education
In the 1970s Carol Chomsky became interested in how children acquire the ability to read. Throughout her research, she aided in the development of a technique to help children struggling to read that continues to be used in Education contexts today. Repeated reading is a method that requires children to read a meaningful passage silently while listening to a recording of themselves saying the text out loud. The child would then repeat this princess until fluency was achieved. In her 1976 study, “After Decoding: What?”, Dr. Chomsky details working with third-grade students to develop their literacy. She notes that by this time the children had already developed the ability to sound out words, and had an adequate understanding of word analysis (i.e. recognizing word endings). At this stage, they had moved past the introductory skills needed for reading, such as learning the alphabet, yet these children’s reading skills were stagnating. Rather, Dr. Chomsky found that the children had an extremely passive attitude toward the act of reading. She notes that active participation by the child is needed to fully grasp and organize the information from the written material. She concludes that the children in this study had stopped actively participating and were retreating from the task entirely. Dr. Chomsky concluded that to effectively improve reading she would have to disrupt this behavior by introducing a task that would capture their attention and provide large amounts of interesting and meaningful material to the children. Although the task may seem mechanical, Dr. Chomsky found that over the several months of this trial, the children developed a more active engagement with reading and developed a new confidence in their skills. In the time since her research, the method of repeated reading has been studied by psycholinguists and has often been shown to be a statistically significant intervention to ameliorate children’s reading and word recognition.
Why Is Carol Chomsky Overlooked?
Why Is Carol Chomsky Overlooked?
Dr. Carol Chomsky’s decades-long career included many noteworthy accomplishments including being a faculty member of the Harvard Graduate School of Education from 1972 to 1997. While perhaps recognized in her time, it seems her work has largely faded from the view of Linguistics. While writing this article, I mentioned my topic to a variety of linguists within the department. Much like myself, very few knew that Noam Chomsky had a wife, let alone a one that made significant contributions to our field in her own right. In light of these reactions I was curious to learn more about her work and to find an answer to my question: why is no one talking about Carol? Instinctively, I knew the answer was most likely mid-century (and ongoing) sexism. Unfortunately, Carol Chomsky is by no means the first woman whose scientific contributions have been overlooked. For decades women have been sidelined for the sake of their male counterparts' accomplishments. To name a few, the astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell was famously snubbed from receiving the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics for her work on radio pulsars, the prize was instead awarded to her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish. Furthermore, Rosalind Franklin was a chemist whose work significantly contributed to the discovery of the structure of DNA, however, she has been largely overshadowed by her contemporaries, Francis Crick and James Watson. It seems that the work of Dr. Carol Chomsky is equally overlooked by not only Linguists but also the larger scientific community. So far In my undergraduate Linguistic education, I have learned many names that have shaped our field: Boas, Vygotsky, De Saussure, Sapir, Chomsky & Harris. These names create a legacy within the history of linguistics that stretches back to the earliest investigations into the nature of language by antiquity. Despite the potential flaws of their theories or the shortcomings of their work, these men are afforded the privilege of a legacy and name recognition that others are not. Why them and not Carol? Or any of the other non-white male linguists that have helped shape Linguistics? I think this is an important question to ask ourselves as Linguists because who we afford a legacy reflects on our goals as a field of study and informs the knowledge of future Linguistic researchers. In short, I think Carol Chomsky serves as a prime example of how forgotten contributions can lead to a gap in our collective knowledge.
Carol Chomsky passed away at the age of 78 from cancer on December 19th, 2008. She is survived by her husband and three children.
Mary McCarthy
April 2023
Linguistics & Psychology Student at the University of Alberta
References
References
———. 1976. “After Decoding: What?” Language Arts 53 (3): 288–314.
Marquard, Bryan. 2008. “Carol Chomsky; at 78; Harvard Language Professor Was Wife of MIT Linguist.” Boston.Com, December 20, 2008. http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2008/12/20/carol_chomsky_at_78_harvard_language_professor_was_wife_of_mit_linguist/.
Rask, Rasmus. n.d. “An Outline of the History of Linguistics.”
Samuels, S. Jay. 1979. “The Method of Repeated Readings.” The Reading Teacher 32 (4): 403–8.
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