Chapter 1 1951

It is a widely shared opinion that the new discipline of emerged during the 1950s. Nothing could be further from the truth. The purpose of this book is to sketch a history of psycholinguistics, the of , going back to the end of the eight- eenth century, when empirical research began in earnest. Still, it makes sense to begin where psycholinguistics is generally believed to have started, in the early 1950s and more precisely in 1951. That is, to some extent, familiar ground. We will then time travel, over almost two centuries, from the early Romantic period back to this era. In the book’s last chapter, we will return safely to the 1950s, but now recognizing that those years formed no less, but also no more, than a hinge in an old, well-established, and respectable science. The year 1951 will indeed stand out as a hinge in the history of psycholinguistics, although not by design. It was sheer coincidence that three landmark events were packed in that one year halfway through the twentieth century. The first event was the Interdisciplinary Summer Seminar in Psychology and , which was held at Cornell University from June 18 to August 10. It set out to “explore the relationships which might exist between the fields of psychology and linguistics” and to make recommendations for the development of a field of overlap coined “psycholinguis- tics.” It is widely considered to be the birth of modern psycholinguistics. The second event was the publication of George Miller’s Language and . This textbook reviewed the state of the art in the psychology of language and communica- tion. Its systematic treatment of the empirical literature covered more than five decades of research, occasionally reaching back into the nineteenth-century French and German roots of the field. The new discipline of psycholinguistics that was about to be launched would actually continue a century-old research tradition in the psychology of language. The third landmark was ’s paper “The problem of serial order in behavior.” This was the first frontal attack on the traditional behaviorist associative-chain theories of serial behavior, such as and language. In that paper, Lashley pleaded for a new syntactic approach to the treatment of all skilled hierarchical behavior. This was to become a core issue in the imminent “.”

The Interdisciplinary Summer Seminar in Psychology and Linguistics and its follow-up Cornell 1951 The Summer Seminar would not have happened without John Bissell Carroll (1916–2003) (Fig. 1.1 ). John (or Jack) Carroll grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. When he was 14, he

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(a) (b) Fig. 1.1 (a) John Bissell Carroll. © SLTI. Reproduced here with permission. (b) The cover title of his 1951 report.

happened to attend a talk at the local children’s museum by a certain Mr. Benjamin Whorf, on Aztec and Maya Indians. At the time, Whorf, a fire insurance agent, was also a graduate student of the great linguist Edward Sapir at Yale, and was spending much time on translating an old Nahuatl text. After the talk, John became Whorf ’s youthful assistant, helping him looking up in a Spanish Nahuatl dictionary. Whorf greatly inspired the young Carroll over the three years of their cooperation and they continued to keep in touch until Whorf ’s death in 1941. Whorf also introduced Jack to Edward Sapir, who, mostly through his writings, had aroused Carroll’s interest in . But, Sapir convinced Carroll that linguistics would not provide him with a viable career. Something like the psychology of language would offer better opportunities. After his undergraduate studies at , where he was introduced to Weiss’s behavioristic psychology of language, Carroll became B.F. Skinner’s very first graduate student at the . It was not a perfect match. Skinner, whose work we will discuss in Chapter 8, taught a course in the psychology of language, but Carroll could not recognize or discuss the linguistics he had become well acquainted with through his early training. Skinner, however, was kind enough to introduce him to George Zipf at , who, in turn, kindled Jack’s interest in the study of frequencies. Skinner also had him work with Louis Thurstone at Chicago on a factor analytic approach to the testing of verbal abilities. At the age of 25 Carroll spent a year at Indiana with J.R. Kantor, the most behaviorist of all of language (see Chapter 8). There Carroll published a lucid paper which laid out a strictly Skinnerian program for the study of verbal behavior. Only a few years later, then a Harvard professor in the department of education, he accepted an invitation from the Carnegie Corporation to review the state of the art in linguistics and its possible appli- cations. During 1950 he traveled all over the country to interview the leading American linguists. The report he submitted was very well received. 1 It recommended the

1 Carroll ( 1953 ) is an extended, revised version of the report.

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development of “language psychology” as an interdisciplinary field. As a man of action, Carroll’s next step was to apply to the Research Council (SSRC) for the funding of a workshop on that topic. It was to become the Summer Seminar in Psychology and Linguistics at Cornell University. Carroll continued to play a central role on the psy- cholinguistic scene, as will be apparent from Chapters 10–13 and 15. In 1974 he moved to the University of North Carolina, where he became emeritus in 1982. The Cornell seminar was both a mutual teaching and a joint planning exercise among three senior psychologists and three senior linguists. Aside from Carroll himself, the psychologists were Charles Osgood of the University of Illinois and Richard Solomon of Harvard University. Osgood had made a in the psychology of language with his work on the semantic differential (see Chapters 8 and 15). Solomon had worked on tachistoscopic word recognition.2 The linguists were Fred Agard, a specialist in second- at Cornell University; Stanley Newman, a former Sapir student and linguistic anthropologist from the University of New Mexico; and , linguist and a leading scholar in semiotics (the study of signs and symbols) from Indiana University.3 At the end of eight intensive weeks they had produced a 57-page report clarifying the roles of psychology, linguistics, psycholinguistics, and in analyzing the process of communication. It also discussed some of the core research issues for psy- cholinguistics, including potential applications, and it concluded with a list of practical recommendations. Figure 1.2 represents the report’s diagram of the communication process. We are as much speakers as we are hearers; we are both transmitters and receivers of messages, and we normally alternate in reciprocity between these roles. The diagram depicts five com- ponents in the process and indicates the disciplines that (should) deal with them. Psychology deals with the intentional speaker and the interpretative hearer. This is the domain of , needs, attitudes, intents, meanings, overt acts, etc. Descriptive linguistics is primarily concerned with the structure and content of messages, irrespective of their antecedents or subsequent effects. And then there is psycholinguistics, neatly assigned with the two tasks of studying the speaker’s and the listener’s decoding behavior. When we speak, how do events at the semantic level, the level of ideas, deter- mine our “selection of articulatory motor skill sequences”? And how, when we listen, do “auditory or visual receptor skill sequences” determine our selection of semantic events? The report appeared two years after Shannon and Weaver’s The mathematical theory of communication, which had deeply impressed students of communication. It had suddenly become possible to quantify the amount of information transmitted between sender and receiver, its redundancy, transmission rate and noise in the channel, and so on. George Miller was quick to thoroughly integrate information theory in his textbook. The report dutifully stressed the importance of information theory, but did not do

2 Together with David Howes, he had just discovered the in visual word recogni- tion, see Chapter 12. 3 There were also two graduate students involved, Don Dulany and Leonard Newmark.

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INTENTIVE BEHAVIOR INTERPRETIVE OF SPEAKER MESSAGE BEHAVIOR OF HEARER (psychology) (linguistics) (psychology)

ENCODING BEHAVIOR DECODING BEHAVIOR (psycholinguistics) (psycholinguistics)

EFFICIENCY OF COMMUNICATION PROCESS (information theory) Fig. 1.2 The communicative process. Data from Report and recommendations of the Interdisciplinary Summer Seminar in Psychology and Linguistics . Cornell University, June 18–August 10.

much more. Diagram and text assigned to information theory the task of studying the “efficiency” of the communicative process as a whole and of the encoding and decoding processes in particular, but without specifying much further detail. Although the assignments of linguistics versus psychology/psycholinguistics in Figure 1.2 seem natural enough, the text signals deeper issues. After remarking that “psychological theory has little relevance for descriptive linguistics,” the report adds that “when interest shifts to the explanation of linguistic structure it is necessary to appeal to psycholinguistics and perhaps to general psychological theory” (p. 31). Here the authors are (unknowingly) in the good company of Heymann Steinthal, from a century earlier, who we will soon meet in Chapter 2. The issue of explanation in linguistics was in for a rather tumultuous come-back during the “cognitive revolution.” One research issue that received a lot of in the report was “the problem of units.” The speaker’s units of production need not coincide with linguistic units. A speaker may say it is a case of . . . (pause) homicide . Here, it is a case of is not a linguistic unit, but the pause marks a boundary between the speaker’s units of encoding. Inevitably, given the preponderance of information theory, the discussion leads into considering transitional probabilities. The probability that a speaker will say of after It is a case . . . is much higher than the probability of saying homicide after It is a case of . . . . This indicates a difference in transitional habit strength. These associative habits are the underlying determinants of the speaker’s encoding or selection of units. On this matter, the report follows the standard behaviorist approach to sequential behavior. The stream of speech is governed by the habit strengths of associations. The preferred mathematical of transitional probabilities is in terms of Markov chains. This is not different from Miller’s approach in his textbook and, like Miller, the report discusses higher-order transitional probabilities. The probability of saying do after you is not particularly high, but do is cer- tainly a quite probable continuation of how do you . . . . We will do a better job in predict- ing the speaker’s next move when we take more antecedent words into account. First-order transitional probabilities form a one-word only (the frequency of the target word itself). Second-order probabilities take stretches of two subsequent words into account (the target word and the one preceding it), and so on. It was the general belief that there would be some, hopefully not too high, order of transitional probabilities that would

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give a satisfactory account of the speaker’s transitional habits. “Not too high,” because the relevant number of transitional probabilities would become intractable. It is to the credit of the report that this story is told with an inkling of doubt. In particular, the hierarchical nature of language units (words as parts of phrases, phrases as parts of larger phrases or sentences) is not transparently dealt with in this statistical approach, or in terms of the report: “the characteristics of messages containing a hierarchy of units have not been mathematically formalized in any satisfactory way” (p. 17). The seminar wrestled with the elusive “problem of .” The report stresses that much confusion can be prevented by making clear terminological distinctions. Lexical meaning (the meaning of words) is different from grammatical meaning (the meaning of features such as tense or aspect). Denotative meaning is different from connotative meaning. Still, the report is optimistic about the possibilities of a theory approach to meaning. Meanings are, in essence, habitual responses to stimuli. In Osgood’s so- called “mediation theory” of meaning, the association between an overt (S), such as a spoken word, and an overt response (R), such as pushing a button, would normally be mediated by an entirely internal chain of “little” s–r associations. But Carroll was practical enough to use the term “idea” when such a mediational process was referred to. Optimism also derived from advances in making meaning measurable. Osgood’s recent invention of the semantic differential technique made connotative meaning measurable and new techniques of would get to the semantic organization underlying whole texts. With John Carroll, Benjamin Whorf ’s former assistant, in the driver’s seat, the report not surprisingly also discusses the “linguistic Weltanschauung problem.” Does a language predispose its speakers to attend to particular distinctions when they perceive or think? Suggestions are made for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural experiments, together with ethnologists (i.e., cultural anthropologists). It had been Carroll’s goal to be practical. The report ends with a number of recommen- dations to promote cooperation and exchange of information between linguists and psychologists. It proposed, in particular, the establishment of a standing committee on psycholinguistics in the SSRC and the organization of further interdisciplinary confer- ences and symposia on selected topics. Both recommendations received diligent follow-up. In October 1952 the SSRC estab- lished a Committee on Linguistics and Psychology, with Charles Osgood as its first chair- man and among its members John Carroll and Thomas Sebeok. One of the committee’s first decisions was to organize a follow-up to the summer seminar at Cornell. It took place at Indiana University in the summer of 1953.

Indiana 1953 The Summer Seminar on Psycholinguistics was, like the Cornell seminar, an intensive eight-week mutual tutoring and research planning endeavor. The linguists Thomas Sebeok and Joseph Greenberg were involved in this project full-time. The latter was a linguistic anthropologist and typologist at . The full-time psycholo- gists were Charles Osgood and James Jenkins of the University of Minnesota, the latter a

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former student of Skinner. Also present was Floyd G. Lounsbury, an ethnologist at Yale with a strong background in behavioral psychology. Involved for a two-week period were John Carroll, MIT linguist , and anthropologist Joseph Casagrande of the SSRC. The seminar produced a 200-page joint report, Psycholinguistics: A survey of theory and research problems, which was to lead a life of its own. It was produced at top speed by a collection of 11 authors, the five full-time staff members, John Carroll, and five graduate students: Susan Ervin, the sole woman on the seminar team and a main contributor to the report, Leonard Newmark, Sol Saporta, Donald Walker, and Kellog Wilson. It was published as a book in 1954, edited by Osgood and Sebeok. It is clearly apparent from the publication that it was Charlie Osgood who took the lead in this joint author effort. He alone produced one-third of the text and his mediation-theoretical perspective is evident in the remainder of the volume. Co-editor Sebeok’s contribution to the writing was, in fact, minimal. Osgood was becoming a primary moving force behind the new psycholinguistics, both scientifically and organizationally. Here, he was on a par with George Miller. There was mutual respect, but little cooperation between these two. Charles Egerton Osgood (1916–1991) 4 was born and grew up in the Boston area (Fig. 1.3 ). He went to Dartmouth College and then, for his graduate training in psychology, to . There, Clark Hull became his idol, but only for being the powerful thinker he was, not as a person to work with. It was Donald Marquis who supervised Osgood’s thesis work, Meaningful similarity of interference in learning. Meaning would always stay his central research interest. Osgood was convinced that, in the landscape of American , Hull’s mediation theory provided the best treatment of signs and their meanings. Over his lifetime Osgood continued to refine and qualify this m ediational neobehaviorism5 to handle meaning in language behavior. In 1949 Osgood moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana, where he would stay till the end of his academic career in 1982. Before Urbana, he had been teaching introductory courses in psychology at Yale and the University of Connecticut. It was during this time that he conceived of and wrote his astonishing Method and theory in , an 800-page comprehensive review of the experimental literature and its theoretical interpretation. It appeared in 1953. Producing Psycholinguistics during the fall of that same year must have been his next major challenge. The Cornell seminar in 1951 had been an eye-opener for Osgood. It was his first professional meeting with linguists; linguists turned out to be serious scientists: “not only were the linguists there neither polyglots nor lexicographers, but they were robust, rigorous and objective.”6 Osgood learned to appreciate their structural descriptions of “the message,” their cross-linguistic

4 William F. Brewer published, in 1994, an excellent biography of Charles Osgood in the American Journal of Psychology. 5 To be discussed in Chapter 8. 6 From Osgood (1975 , p. 17).

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Fig. 1.3 Charles Egerton Osgood.

work, and their work on second-language learning and bilingualism. But he did not see enough “ in the foreground.” His own work on the semantic differential had, so far, been linguistically uninformed. That was not much different, a few years later, in his best-selling monograph The measurement of meaning (1957). It was not until Katz and Fodor’s featural semantics of 1963 that he incorporated linguistic ideas into his work on word meaning. During the decade following 1951, Osgood was, with Miller, the dominant personality in psycholinguistics. He was an excellent organizer and an internationally esteemed neo-behaviorist . The Indiana report continued to expand on the issues of the 1951 Cornell report. It distinguished three approaches to language behavior. The linguistic approach is largely descriptive, determining the phonological, morphological, and syntactic units for a particular language and searching for universals across (including any proto- language that might have been the origin of known languages). Issues of meaning, such as homonymy and paraphrase, are the purview of lexicographers. The learning theory approach is concerned with the explanation of language behavior in terms of learned associations between stimuli and responses, i.e., verbal habits. A whole gamut of behaviorist theories is reviewed in the book, and the issue of units is a central one, as already pointed out in the Cornell report. What are the units of encoding and decoding? How do they relate to linguistic units and how can they be empirically studied? The information theory approach quantifies the transmission of information in the channel from speaker to listener. As in the Cornell report, the associative habits from learning theory are mapped onto transitional probabilities in the communication chan- nel. Associations between higher-order behavioral units are ideally mapped onto higher- order transitional probabilities. The mathematics applied is entirely in terms of higher-order Markov processes.

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The report treats various applications of these approaches, in particular to first and second-language learning and bilingualism. It also proposes a learning theory account of language change. For instance, in a redundant message one element or unit is strongly predictive of a subsequent unit. Such a strong association increases the probability that one of the elements becomes modified (such as a word unit turning into a suffix). For all these cases of learning and change, mediation theory provides the psychological explanation in Psycholinguistics. The report also gives considerable attention to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the idea that a culture’s language affects its users’ (see Chapter 13). It discusses stronger and weaker forms of the hypothesis and discusses ways of testing them experimentally. Eric Lenneberg had just started a new paradigm of having participants name color patches, to which we will return in Chapter 13. Psycholinguistics: A survey of theory and research problems, the second stage of the rocket launched in 1951, became a landmark. It signaled the emergence of a new interdis- ciplinary effort in the study of verbal behavior. As Diebold ( 1965 ) remarked, it became the “charter of psycholinguistics.” It had the (very American) charm of beaming “here we are and we’ll do it.” It was a barely concealed invitation to jump on the band- wagon. That is what happened and on a remarkable scale, a matter to which we will return in Chapter 15. Why was the launching of this rocket so successful? There were multiple causes. The appearance of Shannon and Weaver’s A mathematical theory of communication in 1949 had deeply impressed American psychologists and, to some extent, linguists. The study of (human) communication is a real science , objective, quantitative, general, with techno- logical applications in the offing. Both the 1951 and 1954 reports explicitly pronounce this new theory of communication to be their starting point. Of crucial importance was the “pulling in” of linguists. At the time, American linguistics was a minor and quite isolated academic discipline. Edward Sapir had good reason for discouraging John Carroll to go for a career in linguistics. But the psychologist Carroll knew this linguistic world and its concerns in great detail. He had, quite correctly, sensed that both disciplines would profit by crossing their borders. Psycholinguistics had the potential of sparking innovative research, as had happened in so many other interdisciplinary endeavors (such as physical chemistry, biophysics, and biochemistry). Still, this would not have worked without a coalition of strong, highly motivated leaders. Carroll, Sebeok, and Osgood forged the alliance of forces in the new SSRC Committee on Linguistics and Psychology. These leaders were keen to involve talented graduate students from the very beginning. Many of them were co-authors of the reports and became leaders themselves in the new enterprise. It also would not have worked without the fruitful multidisciplinary ambience and young talent concentrated in the MIT–Harvard region. Here, George Miller exerted effective intellectual leadership. A crucial role was certainly played by the substantial financial impetus. For the SSRC Committee that impetus came initially from the Carnegie Corporation, where visionary psychologist John W. Gardner, “the ultimate builder of ideas and unifier of people and

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causes,”7 played an instrumental role. More generally, as will be discussed in Chapter 15, communication engineering and science had been receiving major funding, often defense funding, since World War II. Psycholinguistics was getting its fair share. A final critical factor was that there was sufficient theoretical agreement within the leading forces. Learning theory was common ground in American psychology, in spite of large differences in detail. Most linguists were amenable here, in part because it did not matter much to their real theoretical concerns and in part because Bloomfield’s had, since his Language (1933), payed lip service to an objective (i.e., behaviorist) foundation of the discipline. At the same time, the new psycholinguistics was very much a US internal affair. Only there could the behaviorist theory consensus exist. European psychologists and linguists were by tradition mentalists. There was hardly any move to involve any of them. No , no , no . Even Roman Jakobson had not been involved in either of the two seminars, although he had been in the US since 1941 and had occupied the chair for Slavic Languages at Harvard University since 1949. His talent was spotted by George Miller, who would soon introduce Jakobson’s into his theory of speech sound . Most dramatic of all was the fact that the greatest pre-war European psychologist of language, Karl Bühler, was in 1951 spending his time, in almost total academic isolation, as a practicing clinician at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. Back in 1930 Bühler had been offered William McDougall’s former chair at Harvard, but by the 1950s his influence was negligble.

George Miller’s Language and communication George Miller was not involved with the Summer Seminars. He was in fact running another SSRC seminar himself at Tufts during the same 1951 summer period, on mathematical models for behavior theory. Miller was appointed to the new SSRC Committee on Psychology and Linguistics, but did not show up to meetings 8 and resigned by the end of the first year. He was deep into other issues, in particular mathe- matical psychology. His time in the new psycholinguistics was soon to come. Nevertheless, Language and communication , which nowhere uses the term “psycholinguistics,” addressed many of the same issues as the Seminars. What a team produced in the Psycholinguistics survey, Miller composed all himself before the seminars had even taken place. The text is a blueprint for a science of communication that is both possible and worth pursuing. It both reviews and unifies various existing approaches. Shannon and Weaver’s communication theory provides the background framework, and the tools of information theory are skillfully applied throughout the text. Miller also explicitly opts for a behavioristic approach to provide the psychological basis for a theory of communication. Psychology is a public affair. It has to explain publicly observable behavior. “The bias is behavioristic – not fanatically behavioristic, but certainly tainted

7 From Independent Sector obituary, 2002. 8 John Carroll (personal communication).

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Fig. 1.4 . © Courtesy of Harvard University Department of Psychology.

by a preference. There does not seem to be a more scientific kind of bias, or, if there is, it turns out to be behaviorism after all.” (p. v). The other explicit choice is for facts, as opposed to speculations. “Rejecting opinions in favor of facts helps to reduce this vast topic to manageable proportions” (p. 1). Indeed, the book rather comprehensively reviews half a century of empirical literature in the psychology of language, but eschews speculation. The latter holds as much for the introspective Wundtian tradition in the psychology of language as for objective speculation. There is, for instance, no mention of An objective psychology of , Kantor’s (1936 ) behavioristic diatribe against a subjective psychology of language (see Chapter 8). George Armitage Miller (1920–2012, Fig. 1.4), born in Charleston, West Virginia, received a Master of Arts degree from the in 1941. He had wanted to become a writer, but decided to pursue a degree in psychology instead and was admit- ted to Harvard University, where he received his PhD in 1946, under the supervision of psychophysicist Smith (Smitty) Stevens. In 1951 Miller left Stevens’ laboratory for an associate professorship at MIT, but then returned to Harvard in 1955 where he would, with interruptions, stay till 1968. It was during this period that Miller and his co-workers applied notions from Chomsky’s generative to psycholinguis- tics. While at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study (1958–1959), Miller, Galanter, and Pribram wrote their influential book Plans and the structure of behavior, which replaced the basic S–R reflex units of learning theory with TOTE units, hierarchically organ- ized cybernetic feedback units.9 In 1960, Miller, together with , founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard, which became a breeding place for the

9 TOTE stands for test–operate–test–exit.

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American cognitive revolution. Miller left Harvard for in 1968, but spent the years 1972 to 1976 as a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. There, together with Johnson-Laird, he wrote Language and perception. In 1979 Miller moved to , the final post in his rich scientific career. There he pub- lished The science of words (1991) and kept working on his Wordnet , a semantic network for the English language. During the war years Stevens ran a defense-financed, and well-equipped laboratory in the basement of Memorial Hall. Miller worked on acoustic issues in speech communication. The intelligibility of speech under adverse conditions, such as noise or interruption, was a main topic in his experimental research. And there were potential applications. What is the best masking noise for speech? Miller’s answer: it is speech. Some of this fine, but classified, work was published right after the war. 10 Miller contin- ued in the laboratory as an assistant professor till he moved to MIT in 1951. These were extremely productive years. Not only did he write Language and communication, but he took the lead in introducing Shannon’s new information theory to psychology. Shannon’s original two-part paper was published in The Bell Systems Technical Journal of 1947. It was only a year later, in 1948, that Miller and Frick’s paper Statistical behavioristics and sequences of responses appeared in Psychological Review. It was the first application of information theory to psychology, and it set the scene for a small revolution. Seminars and symposia on the Shannon and Weaver theory followed in rapid succession and its applicability in psychology seemed to have no limits. In the Miller and Frick paper the application had been to sequential behavior. Its treatment had always been a controver- sial issue in behavioristic psychology. Here were the mathematical tools to be applied. The issue of sequential behavior in speech and language would be Miller’s focal interest for several years to come. His first go at this problem is fully worked out in Language and communication , but the notions of channel capacity, sequential constraints, redundancy, etc. turned out to be of much wider applicability and Miller was, again, a leader in the experimental manipulation of these quantities in studies of auditory and visual percep- tion. His invited paper What is information measurement? (1953) made all this accessible to the wide audience of the American Psychologist. Ultimately it led Miller to his most cited paper, The magical number seven plus or minus two of 1957. As Bruner (1983 , p. 97) put it, referring to this publication: “I think if there were a retrospective Nobel Prize in Psychology for the mid-1950s, George Miller would win it hands down – and on the basis of one article.” Miller’s occupation with information theory did not close his eyes to the latest developments in psycholinguistics. He used the term “psycholinguistics” as the title of his overview chapter in Lindzey’s Handbook of , which appeared in the same year (1954a) as the Osgood and Sebeok survey. Language and communication leads the reader “from the molecular to the molar.” It first reviews the articulation and perception of speech sounds. It demonstrates in par- ticular the strong relationship between the intelligibility of a speech sound (be it a

10 For a complete listing of these studies, see W. Hirst ( 1988 ).

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, a nonsense syllable, a digit, or a word in a sentence) and the item’s information value (its redundancy, or the number of alternatives). It then turns to language statistics. There is Zipf ’s law rf = k, which claims that the frequency of occurrence (f) of a word in a text (for instance the word the), times its rank order (r) in the frequency hierarchy (usually “1” for the word the ) is a constant, k.11 The statistics become more interesting when context is taken into account. A speech sound or word, of whatever frequency, can be more or less redundant dependent on its preceding context. It was Miller’s idea to relate transitional habit strengths to transitional probabilities. The talker “has learned a set of intraverbal associations . . . The occurrence of a particular symbol or sequence of symbols limits the range of alternatives from which the talker can choose succeeding symbols because he must proceed in accordance with the verbal associa- tions he has learned.” (p. 192). The higher the statistical order of approximation to normal text, the more natural it sounds. It fits verbal habits better and it should, there- fore, also be easier to memorize. The classical Miller and Selfridge experiment of 1950 demonstrates this indeed to be the case. They used word strings of increasing approximation to English, such as ( fi rst-order): abilities with that beside I for waltz you the sewing (third-order): tall and thin boy is a biped is the beat ( fi fth-order): they saw the play Saturday and sat down beside him (text): the history of California is largely that of a railroad The ease of recalling a string of words rapidly increases to a fifth-order approximation, but there is no difference in between higher-order approximations and real text. This led to Miller’s optimistic view that “The process of forging sentences is not inexplicable” (p. 192). Of course, Miller was aware that associative habits could not do all of the work. Personal and the needs of the audience may affect which associations are going to be relevant. However, the “striking thing ” is “the great uniformity in the verbal habits of all normal members of the language community ” (pp. 192–193, Miller’s emphasis). Miller’s text addresses many, if not most, of the issues in the Osgood and Sebeok survey, and often in a similar vein: verbal learning in children, their acquisition of the phoneme and word repositories of their language, individual differences in style, content analysis, etc. It is more elaborate on issues of readability of texts, but less so on Whorfian issues of . It has, in addition, a chapter on thinking and problem solving, including syllogistic reasoning, and another one on the spreading of verbal information through social networks. Here, Miller is one of the first to apply graph theory to the modeling of communication in small groups. The applications are plentiful: the effectiveness of mass media, the spreading of (increasingly distorted) rumors, etc. On one topic both surveys are weak: the domain of language disorders, in particular . Psycholinguistics hardly mentions the issue. Language and communication does

11 Zipf ’s law will be taken up in Chapter 12.

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have a paragraph on aphasia, but a very inconclusive one: “Among the modern investiga- tors one can find almost every point of view, ranging from belief in strict, detailed locali- zation at one extreme to a belief in a generalized loss of abstract at the other” (p. 240). Miller confines himself to presenting cases of expressive and amnesic aphasia. Indeed, it was a moment of theoretical abeyance in aphasiology, but there is no indication that Miller was much aware of the rich European tradition, more than century old, in aphasia research. In all other respects, Miller’s review of the empirical facts in the study of human verbal behavior demonstrates his thorough knowledge of over half a century of empirical research. The text goes back to Galton’s (1879 ) work on word associations, McKeen Cattell’s ( 1889 ) pioneering work on letter , and Merkel’s ( 1885 ) work on the effect of numbers of alternatives on the reaction time in disjunctive reactions. Admittedly, many of these old references came from secondary sources, in particular Woodworth (1938 ), but Miller’s text does create a sense of history, flowing without major interrup- tion from the European sources to the present (i.e., 1951) moment. In spite of this, Miller did not feel that history had endowed us with a coherent science. In his paper (1954a) he writes: “Psycholinguistics is a very young child of two reasonably mature behavioral sciences and it is not yet entirely clear what it includes or how it will develop . . . What is not clear is just how far each science overlaps the other or how the separate conceptual schemes used in the two can be formulated in a common vernacular for purposes of comparison and mutual supplementation.” (p. 693). Both Miller and Osgood/Sebeok embrace the term “psycholinguistics” to denote a program for integrat- ing two sciences that have largely developed independently. Miller was aware of the fact that such integration had been the normal case in the European tradition. It had been “more inclined to admit that psychological factors are indispensible in the solution of many linguistic problems.”12 As we will see in the next chapter, it was Heymann Steinthal who wrote in 1855: “Speaking is a mental activity and consequently linguistics belongs to the circle of psychological sciences.”13

Karl Lashley’s The problem of serial order in behavior While the was practically ignored in the previous two landmark works discussed, it figured centrally in Lashley’s paper The problem of serial order in behavior . He presented it at the Hixon symposium Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, which was held at the California Institute of Technology in 1948. It was intended to restore communication between psychologists, psychiatrists, and neurophysiologists. The proceedings of the meeting appeared in 1951. Karl Lashley (1890–1958) was a zoologist, physiological psychologist, and brain sur- geon (Fig. 1.5 ). He received his PhD at , where he worked with

12 Miller (1954a , p. 695). 13 “Sprechen ist eine Seelenthätigkeit und folglich gehört die Sprachwissenschaft in den Kreis psycholo- gischer Wissenschaften” (Steinthal 1855 , pp. 141–142).

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Fig. 1.5 Karl Lashley.

James Watson, the father of behaviorism. In 1935 he moved to Harvard University, where from 1937 he occupied the chair of . He also directed the Yerkes Laboratory in Orange Park, Florida, from 1942. He retired from both posts in 1955. In his 1951 paper Lashley challenged both mainstream and main- stream psychology to reconsider their prevailing handling of temporal integration. He took the unusual approach of demonstrating the complexities of sequential ordering from linguistics, citing (on p. 181) 14 Fournié ( 1877 ): “Speech is the only window through which the physiologist can view cerebral life.” Physiologists as much as psychologists tacitly or overtly adhere to associative-chain theories in explaining serial behavior, Lashley argues, and that is a dead-end track. Physiologists essentially consider the brain as static, only becoming active upon receiving some sensory stimulus. This is then followed by a chain of reflexes, eventually causing some motor response. Psychologists, introspectionists, and behaviorists alike are equally chain theorists. Titchener, for instance, takes the meaning of a word as the chain of associations among the mental images it arouses. Thinking is running such chains, which introspectively appear as inner speech. When Titchener wants to make a point “I hear my own voice speaking just ahead of me.” Lashley: “He need not think but only listen to his inner voice: to the chain of auditory images,” “lazy man”! (p. 184). The behaviorists, from Watson on, are if possible even more addicted to chain-reflex theory. Washburn ( 1916 ), for instance, “describes speech as a succession of vocal acts in which the kinesthetic impulses from each movement serve as a unique stimulus for the next in the series.” (p. 182). This cannot be correct, says Lashley. The elements of speech and language have no fixed orders. The motor actions in pronouncing right and tire involves the same motor elements, but in reverse order. There is no fixed forward association among them. Positioning the (spoken) word right in a sentence, its temporal valence depends on its role as a noun, an

14 Citations from reprint in Saporta (1961 ).

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adjective, an adverb, or verb, and on its homonymic meaning: “The mill-wright on my right thinks it right that some conventional rite should symbolize the right of every man to write as he pleases.” (p. 183). Arranging these words is not due to any direct associations of the word right with other words. What then determines the order? Here, Lashley draws on European aphasiology and consciousness psychology. Aphasiologist Arnold Pick argued in 1913 that, whatever mental schema is active in preparing the content of speech, it must energize a linguistic schema, in which words are inserted. Schemata of different languages need not correspond. German and English, for instance, express the same by way of quite different syntactic orderings. Their syntactic schemata are different. Such a schema is a case of the “determining tendency” or “set” proposed by the Würzburg school.15 Lashley then discusses some instances where such sets are, apparently, active. Errors of typing may be caused that way. For instance, the set for doubling a character, activated by the typing schema for the word look , may lead to typing l-o-k-k instead of l-o-o-k . Similar derailing effects of schemata show up in spoonerisms and tip-of-the- effects, discussed by . Sequential verbal behavior is governed by “a series of hierarchies of organization.” They range from those that order the vocal movements in pronouncing the word, to the ones that determine the order of words in a sentence, the arrangement of sentences in a paragraph, and of paragraphs in a discourse. Lashley then generalizes: “the problems raised by the organization of language seem to me to be characteristic of almost all cerebral activity.” The essential problem of serial order is “the existence of generalized schemata of action,” a “ of act.” (p. 188). Seriality is a property of any complex behavior, whether it is speech or gait or playing music. Lashley was defining the problem that would dominate discussions in linguistics and psycholinguistics for the years to come. Miller’s textbook still viewed serial verbal behavior, such as producing sentences, as the outcome of verbal habits. The sequencing of words emerges from a complex set of intraverbal associations. The report of the Summer Seminar does wonder how such verbal habits can account for the hierarchical nature of language. A speaker always produces a hierarchy of units — text, sentences, mor- phemes, — not just a linear string of units. It recognizes that there must be a system of habit hierarchies for which there is, however, no adequate formal treatment available. Lashley goes for a frontal attack: Associative-chain theories, dominant in behav- iorism, are deeply inadequate for explaining serial behavior. What is needed is a new syntax of hierarchical serial order. Explaining serial order in speech and language will then also set the scene for work in other domains of serial behavior. Lashley’s paper was to become one of the crowbars in the so-called “cognitive revolu- tion.” From the end of the 1950s it was much cited in the effort to undermine the dominant learning theory account of language behavior, the behaviorist consensus on which both Miller’s text and the reports of the 1951 and 1953 Summer Seminars were based.

15 To be covered in Chapter 7.

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Other 1951 milestones The 1951 harvest involved more than just these three landmark events. Howes and Solomon, for instance, discovered the word frequency effect. Words that are frequent in language use are more easily recognized in a tachistoscope than less frequent ones, a finding that reverberates in all modern models of word recognition. The published their invention of a pattern playback device (see Chapter 15). Till the advent of the laboratory computer it became the chosen device for studying the perception of vowels, consonants, and short syllables because it could play back any potentially relevant formant transitions. And last, but not least, there was a linguistic milestone in 1951, Zellig Harris’s Methods in structural linguistics. This was the ultimate statement of distributional analysis, a mechanical, corpus-based discovery procedure for the units of language, phonemes, , and syntactic constituents. Relevant for psycholinguistics was Harris’s claim that these procedures would ultimately allow for a , composed of rules (which he called statements): “The work of analysis leads right up to statements which enable anyone to synthesize or predict utter- ances in the language. These statements form a deductive system with axiomatically defined initial elements and with theorems concerning the relations among them. The final theorems would indicate the structure of the utterances of the language in terms of the preceding parts of the system.” (pp. 372–373). Both Zellig Harris and his student worked on developing such a generative, transformational grammar during the 1950s. It was through the cooperation of George Miller and Noam Chomsky that by the end of the 1950s a crucial further landmark was erected in the history of psycholinguistics. In contrast to Zellig Harris, they proclaimed that a generative grammar is “psychologically real,” i.e., it is mental machinery whose study is a “chapter of psychology.” That story, however, will not be told in this book. Rather, these pages will demonstrate that this Chomsky-and-Miller revolution turned psycholinguistics back to its historical, mentalistic roots.

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