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Jean Aitchison is Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication, University of Oxford, England. In her research she is concerned with the mental lexicon, language change and the language of the media. She is the author of Language Change: Progress or Decay? (Cambridge, 3rd edition, 2001); The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics (4th edition, 1998); Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon (2nd edition, 1994); Linguistics (5th edition, 1999); Introducing Language and Mind (1992); and The Seeds of Speech (Cambridge, 1996).