PREFACE

The Summer Seminar on Psycholinguistics was sponsored by the Social Science Research Council with funds provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and held at Indiana University in 1953. It was part of the program of study being developed by the Council’s Committee on Linguistics and Psychology, most of whose members were participants. It was also in part a continuation of the interuniversity summer research seminar in psychology and linguistics held at Cornell University, June 18—August 10, 1951. The general purpose of this Committee is to stimulate research in the field of language behavior, by conducting a survey of on-going and contemplated research, by organizing where feasible small-scale work-conferences on special problems, by serving as a communication channel among people working in this area, and by discussing and evaluating the present status of the field. It was felt that a summer seminar would provide an unusual opportunity for the members of this Committee to work together intensively over an eight-week period and thereby develop a more intimate understanding of their mutual problems in the language area, as well as placing them in a better position to organize effective work-conferences and study programs.

In the course of the seminar’s activities, it was planned to examine three of the theoretical models of the language process which have been developing rather independently; the membership in the seminar included persons with training in each of these areas. Another purpose of the seminar was to study intensively a number of basic research problems, combining the training and research experiences of the participants in analysing the theoretical backgrounds of these problems and in formulating possible experimental approaches to them. In rough accord with these plans, approximately the first half of the eight-week period of the seminar was spent in the presentation and discussion of the various psycholinguistic problems as approached from these theoretical positions; during the second half of the seminar, the participants worked informally in over-lapping groups on particular problems in psycholinguistics that were felt to be of major significance.

Participants in the Summer Seminar on Psycholinguistics, and hence joint authors of this report, included, in addition to the senior staff members, Greenberg, Jenkins, Lounsbury, Osgood, and Sebeok, the following graduate student members: Susan Ervin (psychologist, Bureau of Social Science Research, Washington, D.C.), Leonard D. Newmark (linguist, Indiana University), Sol Saporta (linguist, University of Illinois), Donald E. Walker (psychologist, The Rice Institute), and Kellogg Wilson (psychologist, University of Illinois). It is fair to say that our graduate students contributed on equal terms with the senior staff both in discussion of psycholinguistic problems and in the writing of this report; it also can be fairly said that they profited greatly from the summer’s experience. The development of any new interdisciplinary field must ultimately depend on young scholars who maintain in a single nervous system the habits of both sciences. Three others were able to participate only through two-week periods of the seminar—John B. Carroll (psychologist, Harvard University), Eric Lenneberg (linguist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Joseph B. Casagrande (staff representative for the Social Science Research Council)—but they also joined significantly in the work of the seminar and have contributed to the content of this report. In addition, the seminar enjoyed visits from a number of scholars interested in the same general area: Grant Fairbanks (psychologist, University of Illinois) demonstrated his speech compression and expansion techniques and also discussed delayed auditory feedback phenomena and the theoretical and practical implications of this work; E. M. Uhlenbeck (linguist, University of Leyden) sat in on our discussion of entropy profiles in sequential speech and played tape recordings made of conversational Javanese; John Lotz (linguist, Columbia University) participated in discussions on the problem of meaning and Werner F. Leopold (linguist, Northwestern University) in discussions on the development of language behavior in children.

We decided to hold our seminar on the campus of Indiana University in conjunction with the Linguistic Institute. The members of the seminar were welcomed at the daily luncheons of the Institute and were thus able, informally, to meet and discuss many matters with the staff of the Linguistic Institute. Our graduate student participants typically carried two courses offered by the Institute and usually sat in on others. Most of the senior staff also took advantage of this opportunity and sat in on one or more of the courses being offered. While these “extra-curricular” activities certainly reduced the time we could devote to the seminar, they contributed to our understanding of psycholinguistic problems. The members of the Summer Seminar on Psycholinguistics thank both the Linguistic Institute, particularly its Director, C. F. Voegelin, and the administration of Indiana University, particularly Vice-President John W. Ash- ton, for making our summer visit both enjoyable and profitable. We also wish to express our gratitude here to the Social Science Research Council and to the Carnegie Corporation of New York for their continued support of this and other interdisciplinary studies in the area of language behavior.

A final word is in order concerning the preparation of this report and its nature. During the latter portion of the seminar, each of the informal work-groups had a chairman whose responsibility it was to organize study of a particular problem and its presentation to the seminar as a whole. When it was later decided to prepare a report for possible publication, it became each chairman’s responsibility to collate materials from the members of his group and write an initial draft. Although specific sections of this report were thus written by individuals (as indicated by footnotes throughout), the actual thought and discussion of each topic was so thoroughly shared within the seminar that it would be difficult if not impossible to properly assign either credit or responsibility as the case might be. Therefore, we wish the reader to view this report as truly a joint product. We also hope the reader will keep in mind that this represents the result of only eight weeks’ work. It is an exploratory survey of an interdisciplinary area, not a scholarly exposition of well-mapped territory; it formulates many problems and suggests possible attacks on them, but it does not present the results of research. So, it is with some trepidation that we offer this rather crude map of what is becoming an important research area—psycholinguistics.

Charles E. Osgood, Editor

University of Illinois

Thomas A. Sebeok, Associate Editor

Indiana University

December 1, 1953