Carol Chomsky, a linguist and education specialist whose work helped
illuminate the ways in which language comes to children, died on Friday at
her home in Lexington, Mass. She was 78.

The cause was cancer, her sister-in-law Judith Brown Chomsky said.

A nationally recognized authority on the acquisition of spoken and written
language, Professor Chomsky was on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate
School of Education from 1972 until her retirement in 1997. In retirement,
she was a frequent traveling companion of her husband, the linguist and
political activist Noam Chomsky, as he delivered his public lectures.

Carol Chomsky was perhaps best known for her book, "The Acquisition of
Syntax in Children From 5 to 10" (M.I.T. Press), which was considered a
landmark study in the field when it appeared in 1969. In it, she
investigated children's tacit, developing awareness of the grammatical
structure of their native language, and their ability to use that awareness
to extract meaning from increasingly complex sentences over time.

Young children, Professor Chomsky found, could distinguish no difference in
meaning between superficially similar sentences like "John promised Bill to
shovel the driveway" and "John told Bill to shovel the driveway" - they
could not discern who did the shoveling in each case. Older children, she
found, could do so automatically, without having been formally taught.

Where earlier investigators had concluded that the acquisition of syntax -
the grammatical structure of sentences - is complete by the time a child is
5, Professor Chomsky demonstrated that when it came to syntactically complex
constructions, at least, acquisition is far from finished at that age.

Professor Chomsky's later research focused on children's acquisition of the
written word. In the late 1970s, she developed a technique for helping
struggling readers attain greater fluency. She had the students silently
read a passage while a tape recording of the passage played along. The
process was repeated until the student could read the text fluently, without
the tape. The technique, known as repeated reading, has been widely used in
classrooms ever since.

Still later, Professor Chomsky turned her attention to educational
technology, creating software that develops reading-comprehension skills.

Carol Doris Schatz was born in Philadelphia on July 1, 1930. She married
Noam Chomsky, whom she had known since childhood, in 1949. In 1951, she
earned a bachelor's degree in French from the University of Pennsylvania.

In the 1960s, faced with the possibility that her husband would be jailed
for his activities in opposition to the Vietnam War, Carol Chomsky resumed
her education: a doctorate would be useful should she need to become the
sole family breadwinner. Though that prospect did not materialize, she
earned a Ph.D. in linguistics from Harvard in 1968.

Besides her husband, the Institute Professor and emeritus professor of
linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor Chomsky
is survived by their three children, Aviva Chomsky, a professor of Latin
American history at Salem State College in Salem, Mass.; Diane Chomsky of
Mexico City; and Harry Chomsky, of Albany, Calif.; a brother, J. Leonard
Schatz of Burlington, Mass.; and five grandchildren.

In a 2001 interview with The Pennsylvania Gazette, the alumni magazine of
the University of Pennsylvania, Carol Chomsky contrasted her brand of
linguistics - practical, experimental, hands-on - with her husband's
abstract, quasi-mathematical approach:

"It's a very different sort of 'linguistics' from Noam's pursuits," she
said. "I always have to laugh when people talk about how interesting our
dinner-table conversation must be since we're in the same field."

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