Detail map of Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States Overview map of Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

A: Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

Miller's "Language and Communication"

1951
George Armitage Miller speaking at the first annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science in 1989.

George Armitage Miller speaking at the first annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science in 1989.

In 1951 American cognitive psychologist George Armitage Miller, then teaching at Harvard, published Language and Communication. Miller was one of the founders of psycholinguistics, which links language and cognition in the analysis of language creation and usage. Influenced by Claude Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948), this book

"used a probabilistic model imposed on a learning-by-association scheme borrowed from behaviorism, with Miller not yet attached to a pure cognitive perspective.The first part of the book reviewed information theory, the physiology and acoustics of phonetics, speech recognition and comprehension, and statistical techniques to analyze language. The focus was more on speech generation than recognition. The second part had the psychology: idiosyncratic differences across people in language use; developmental linguistics; the structure of word associations in people; use of symbolism in language; and social aspects of language use " (Wikipedia article on Goerge Armitage Miller, accessed 12-30-2012).

Timeline Themes

Related Entries