PREFACE TO THIS EDITION

By Thomas A. Sebeok

“Mixing Memory and desire,” in T. S. Eliot’s haunting phrase, this edition of Psycholinguistics recalls a period of ferment, records a decade of solid accomplishment, and forecasts an exciting future. The idea of reuniting linguistics and psychology in the middle of the twentieth century was conceived and sparked by the Carnegie Corporation’s John W. Gardner, a psychologist deeply concerned with the possible implications of such a rapprochement for educational problems at all levels, and was first articulated by John B. Carroll, a psychologist attuned to linguistics from boyhood under the tutelage of Benjamin Lee Whorf. In a seminar on psycholinguistics, held at Cornell University in the summer of 1951 under the sponsorship of the Social Science Research Council, six of us attempted to clarify, in a preliminary way, the relations between the two disciplines. Three of the participants—Carroll, Osgood, and I—continued the search, with three other senior workers and five graduate students, in a second seminar, held at Indiana University two summers afterwards and under the same auspices, resulting in the monograph published in 1954.

Psycholinguistics was aimed at an unusually large potential readership and was therefore published in two simultaneously issued but essentially identical formats: one for linguists, through the network reached by the International Journal of American Linguistics, and another for psychologists, through that of The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. Both editions were rapidly exhausted. Their effects, however, continued to reverberate in many directions, punctuated by further concentrated group efforts, notably the Southwest Project in Comparative Psycholinguistics, and a series of more or less productive work conferences on selected research topics inspired by the book. Seven subjects thus considered were: bilingualism (Columbia University, May 10-11, 1954); techniques of content analysis (Allerton House, University of Illinois, February 9-11, 1955); associative processes in verbal behavior (University of Minnesota, April 25-26, 1955); dimensions of meaning—analytic and experimental approaches (Yale University, May 17-18, 1956); style (Indiana University, April 17-19, 1958); aphasia (Boston, June 16-July 25, 1958); and language universals (Gould House, Dobbs Ferry, April 13-15, 1961). Several of these conferences resulted in major collective works enmeshing an ever widening circle of scholars from a variety of disciplines beside linguistics and psychology; these foci of diffusion include books edited by I. de Sola Pool, Trends in Content Analysis (1959), Thomas A. Sebeok, Style in Language (1960, 1964), Charles E. Osgood and Murray S. Miron, Approaches to the Study of Aphasia (1963), and Joseph H. Greenberg, Universals of Language (1963).

Sol Saporta’s reader was, of course, yet another summative “attempt at shaping a large body of available information about language” in what its editor sensed was, in 1961, still an inchoate academic pursuit. His readings, in turn, provided Diebold with a frame of reference for an admirably erudite history of ideas, stimulating him to trace the many, but only seemingly separate, threads woven through the conglomeration of solitary efforts and highly organized research attacks of the past ten years, which seem at last to have crystallized into the discipline that he—as many others—prefers to continue to identify under the unifying label of psycholinguistics.

The practitioners of this discipline—which is apparently destined to continue to function under this descriptive title—are the new breed of young men and women whom Miller, in his disarming and elegant article appended to this 1965 edition, dignifies, and gives fresh character to, as “The Psycholinguists.” If the 1954 monograph stirs memories, and Die- bold’s account links the past with the present, Miller’s essay envisions the frontiers of a new science facing a range of fundamental human problems the solutions to some of which are already palpable; others—of understanding and belief—may never be tractable, at least within its scope. I envy those who will have the opportunity to review the progress of psycholinguistics from the vantage point of 1975.

January 15, 1965