Elinor Ochs

Elinor Ochs is an American linguistic anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles known for founding, with Bambi Schieffelin, the field of language socialization, which studies how children learn language and culture together through everyday interaction. Her fieldwork in Samoa, documented in Culture and Language Development, examined how caregiving practices shape children's acquisition of linguistic and social competence. Ochs later led long-term studies of American family life and dinnertime narrative through UCLA's Center on Everyday Lives of Families, examining how family talk supports children's cognitive and emotional development and academic socialization.