FOREWORD

By John W. Gardner

The revolution in modern physics has forced us to re-examine fundamental assumptions both in science and in our everyday thinking. No man can predict the ultimate consequences of this re-examination, but nothing seems more certain than that it will lead to a more intensive study of the psychology of perception and the psychology of language. For one of the most significant yields of the recent developments in physics has been a renewed awareness of the role of the observer.

The intimate relationship between the observer and the observed is, of course, a very, very old story. Parmenides and Democritus were aware of it. Philosophers through the centuries have commented on it and some have built their philosophies upon it. The recent work in physics has simply pointed up explicitly and with considerable poignancy certain possible limitations on man’s capacity to perceive and conceptualize.

Any concern with intrinsic limitations upon man’s capacity to conceptualize, or limitations inherent in his mold of thought, must lead inevitably to a concern for the psychology of language. P. W. Bridgman* made the point vigorously in a recent paper: “We cast the world into the mold of our perceptions. The fact that the world I construct is so much like the world you construct is evidence of the similarity of our nervous systems, something which any physiologist could demonstrate for you more directly. We all of us perceive the world in terms of space and time. An interesting question is how inevitably we are forced to this perception by the common properties of our nervous systems, or to what extent it is adventitious, depending on universal features in early experience and in particular on necessities incident to the use of language. This question is possibly capable of some sort of experimental attack, but I think in any event we are here perilously close to the verge of meaning, itself. Some answer may eventually be found to the meaningful aspects of the question.”

The renewed interest in language growing out of the perplexities of modern science is only one—and by no means the most important—of the influences which have produced intensified work on the psychology of language. Descriptive linguists came out of the war immensely stimulated by the heavy demand which had been placed on their skills during the emergency. Starting from a wholly different vantage point, communications engineers have carried through an enormously productive series of studies in acoustics, auditory perception, and the intelligibility of speech sounds. Out of these studies has developed a theory of communication which has proved of great interest to psychologists and philosophers as well as to mathematicians and physical scientists.

Through these and other developments, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers and others who had always exhibited some interest in language developed a renewed Concern for the field. But their various lines of approach to the problem of language were in some respects remarkably disparate. The descriptive linguists discussing phonemes, the communications engineers discussing binary digits, and the psychologists discussing linguistic responses seemed most of the time to be engaged in wholly separate conversations. Here and there one could find individuals whose training was sufficiently broad to participate in all three conversations, but the overlap was tenuous.

It was in this context that the Social Science Research Council set up a Committee on Linguistics and Psychology in October, 1952. The purpose of the Committee was to bring together men trained in the various fields relating to the study of language with a view to planning and developing research on language behavior.

The initial membership of the Committee was as follows: Charles E. Osgood (psychologist, University of Illinois), chairman; John B. Carroll (psychologist, Harvard); Floyd G. Lounsbury (linguist, Yale); George A. Miller (psychologist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology); and Thomas A. Sebeok (linguist, Indiana University). Joseph B. Casagrande (anthropologist) of the Social Science Research Council served as staff for the Committee. Mr. Miller resigned after serving on the Committee for one year, while Joseph H. Greenberg (linguist, Columbia) and James J. Jenkins (psychologist, University of Minnesota) were added to the Committee in the autumn of 1953.

One of the early steps taken by the Committee was to plan and sponsor a research seminar in psycholinguistics. This seminar was held in conjuction with the Linguistic Institute at Indiana University during the 1953 summer session. The seminar first set itself to the task of examining three differing approaches to the language process: (1) the linguist’s conception of language as a structure of systematically interrelated units, (2) the learning theorist’s conception of language as a system of habits relating signs to behavior, and (3) the information theorist’s conception of language as a means of transmitting information. These various points of view were explored in order to appraise their utility for handling different problems and to discover in what respects they could be brought into a common conceptual framework. The second task which the seminar set itself was to examine a variety of research problems in psycholinguistics with a view to developing possible experimental approaches to them.

This monograph is one result of the seminar. It is a collaborative product of the entire group of seminar participants, each of whom is author of one or more sections.

The authors of the monograph, and particularly the two editors, Charles E. Osgood and Thomas A. Sebeok, are to be congratulated upon having carried through an exceedingly arduous assignment. Those who have been familiar with one or another of these fields (and the monograph is written precisely for them) will recognize how difficult it was to bring into a common framework theoretical models of the language process which had evolved independently out of differing kinds of data and differing approaches to these data. The authors would be the first to recognize the extent to which they have fallen short of their goal. Yet it seemed important to them—and this feeling must surely be widely shared—that someone undertake the difficult pioneering task of bringing together these vital lines of research.

Research workers in the special fields involved have reason to be grateful to the authors of this monograph who took time out from their own active research interests to undertake this difficult exploratory task.

May 12, 1954

* P. W. Bridgman, The task before us. Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 83: 3. 104.