The politics of psycholinguistics.

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 51(1), 54–77 Winter 2015 View this article online at Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.21700

C 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

THE POLITICS OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS JAMIE COHEN-COLE

This article narrates the history of the interdisciplinary field of psycholinguistics from its modern organization in the 1950s to its application and influence in the field of reading instruction. Beginning as a combination of structural linguistics, behaviorist psychology, and information theory, the field was revolutionized by the collaboration of the psychologist George Miller and the linguist Noam Chomsky. This transformation was, at root, the adoption of the view that humans should be best understood as creative users of language and the rejection of behaviorist or machine models. Under their influence the field came to treat humans as creative, nonmechanical learners and users of language who, like scientists, hypothesize in order to understand and even perceive the world. This vision of language as a nondeterministic process shaped the field of reading instruction by providing the central C 2014 Wiley Periodicals, model to advocates of the whole-language pedagogical method. Inc.

“The most urgent problems of our world today are the problems we have made for ourselves. They have not been caused by some heedless or malicious Nature, nor have they been imposed on us as punishment by the will of God.” So began George Miller’s presidential address at the 1969 meeting of the American Psychological Association. Having diagnosed the greatest challenges, Miller proceeded to provide an answer to them. What was needed were not only changes in “behavior,” but also in “social institutions” (Miller, 1969). Instead of suggesting top-down management of society, Miller contended that psychologists should “give [psychology] away to people who really need it—and that includes everyone” (Miller, 1969). The best way to be generous, Miller argued, would be to promote a “change in our conception of ourselves and how we live and work together” (p. 1066). Miller suggested that, to further goals of democracy and of public acceptance of psychological ideas, psychologists should eschew two of their most favored models of human nature—those based in behaviorism or that compared people to machines (pp. 1068–1069). He concluded by offering a few concrete examples of how such new democratic conceptions of human nature would function. These involved sharing techniques for conflict resolution, developing enrichment programs to improve the “motor, perceptual, and linguistic skills” of disadvantaged children, and creating child-centered curricula for reading instruction (pp. 1072–1073). That Miller recommended reading instruction was likely a consequence of his specialization in the psychology of language and his leadership of the then new field of cognitive psychology (Crowther-Heyck, 1999). In both capacities, Miller had worked for more than 20 years to “give psychology -a way,” whether in practical application or to other disciplines. This article narrates the history of the interactions among the areas Miller discussed in his lecture: psychology, linguistics, pedagogy, and politics. To do so, I focus on the interdisciplinary field of psycholinguistics from its modern organization in the 1950s to its application and influence in the field of reading instruction from the 1970s on. Jamie Cohen-Cole is Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington University. His recent publications include The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature and “The Creative American: Cold War Salons, Social Science and the Cure for Modern Society” 100(2), pp. 219–262. 2009. Correspondence concerning this paper should be sent to Jamie Cohen-Cole, Department of American Studies, George Washington University, 2108 G Street, NW Washington, DC 20052; [email protected].

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In accounting for the interdisciplinary engagements of psycholinguistics, I follow the varying kinds of “glue” that linked the basic disciplines of psychology and linguistics first to one another and then to application in reading instruction. First, I examine the creation of a behaviorist psycholinguistics in the early 1950s and its subsequent transformation in the latter part of the decade, when Miller began his collaboration with the linguist Noam Chomsky.1 This transformation was, at root, a question of whether humans and scientists should be best understood as creative users of language or in mechanistic terms through behaviorist or machine models. Second, I examine the testing of psycholinguistics on a computer during the 1960s. This testing program involved not only developing a theory of how human language works, but also creating a theoretical language for unifying all of the behavioral sciences. While human cognition examined by psycholinguistics was modeled by mathematical algorithms and computer programs, this article shows that the outcome of this research was to convince Miller and his collaborators that mechanical processes were poorly suited to model human language. As such, this article rectifies accounts that treat the computer as the primary or only model of mind in cognitive science (Edwards, 1996; Crowther-Heyck, 1999; Boden, 2006). Third, I turn to how the outcome of academic struggles of the 1950s and early 1960s over method in psycholinguistics led to its applications in the realm of “whole language” reading instruction starting in the late 1960s. This was, then, exactly the form of interdisciplinary generosity Miller called for in his address. I conclude with an examination of the deeply partisan nature of these events: psycholinguistics and reading pedagogy were political not only in the sphere of the academy, but also as elements in the popular political culture of the late Cold War and beyond. However, the political engagements of social science discussed here—both within and outside of the academy—were not ones of national security that have been a primary point of recent historical analysis (Engerman, 2009, 2010; Solovey & Cravens, 2012; Erickson et al., 2013; Rohde, 2013; Solovey, 2013). Instead, the politics associated with psycholinguistics were, first, about the norms of scientific epistemology and, second, about norms of self and citizenship. TRACING THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS The modern study of psycholinguistics got off the ground in 1951 under the sponsorship of the Social Science Research Council (Brown, 1970, p. vii). Psychologist John Carroll had recently concluded a “survey of linguistics and related disciplines” for the Carnegie Corporation. In his report Carroll noted that “interdisciplinary problems are apparently vast,” but that “there is extremely little interdisciplinary cooperation among the various groups concerned with speech, language and communication.”2 Carroll then proposed that “interdisciplinary cooperation between linguistics and related disciplines” could be started “by organizing exploratory seminars and cooperative surveys.”3 The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and Carnegie Corporation generally 1. Unfortunately, archival records of their collaboration do not detail their relationship. As they were colocated in Cambridge, much of their exchange occurred in conversation. Further, only two boxes remain from Miller’s time at Harvard and MIT (1943–1967). These contain little relating to Chomsky. Noam Chomsky’s papers are only just now being catalogued and remain unavailable to researchers. 2. Quotations are Carroll’s paraphrase of the original report in John Carroll to Robert Sears, “A Proposed Interdisciplinary Seminar in Linguistics and Psychology,” December 5, 1950. Papers of the Social Science Research Council, Accession 2, Series 1, Subseries 1, Box 6, Folder 48. 3. Ibid. Carroll’s report eventually published several years later in Carroll (1953).

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FIGURE 1. From Osgood, Seboek, and Diebold (1965[1953]): psycholinguistics.

encouraged, promoted, and even solicited proposals for interdisciplinary social science. Accordingly, they funded Carroll’s proposal and launched an eight-week summer study at Cornell University in order to develop a new field in the space of overlap between psychology and linguistics—that is, “psycholinguistics” (Carroll, 1951).4 The 1951 session was successful enough that the SSRC funded a second summer study in 1953 at the University of Indiana. Subsequent researchers in psycholinguistics have pointed to the 1953 conference and its product as setting the foundation for their field.5 To Charles Osgood, the coeditor of the proceedings of the 1953 Indiana seminar, psycholinguistics was the keystone of almost all intellectual endeavors. In this framing, psycholinguistics formed the interface between the social sciences in general and the field of psychology in particular. As such, Osgood contended, psycholinguistics is the foundation of all disciplines concerned with human communication, including media studies, rhetoric, and aesthetics. Indeed, he continued, as the science of communication, psycholinguistics explains the human interactions that are the subject matter of fields including “education, sociology, political science, . . . economics . . . history and literature” (1963, p. 248). The broad view of psycholinguistics that Osgood imagined can be seen in the diagram he used to picture language (See figure 1).6 Although pictured as the interdisciplinary center of the social sciences, as understood in the early 1950s, the field of psycholinguistics had a set of distinctive features—ones that adopted a very particular view of the proper constitution of psychology, of language, and of method. First, for the first generation of psycholinguists, “psychology” meant behavioristic “learning theory.” Second, psycholinguistics took the field of linguistics to be defined by the descriptive linguistics program led by Yale linguist Leonard Bloomfield (Harris, 1993; Matthews, 1993; Martin-Nielsen, 2010, p. 136). Together, these versions of psychology and linguistics shared a commitment to an operationist methodology and a focus on description of observable behavior. Because of such methodological orientation, the techniques of comparative linguistics seemed to be easily wedded to behavioristic psychology (Osgood, 1963, 4. The interest of foundations, including Carnegie, in interdisciplinary social science is discussed in Cohen-Cole (2014), Crowther-Heyck (2006), Engerman (2009), and Solovey (2013). 5. For example, Brown (1970, p. vii). 6. While this particular image is taken from (Osgood, 1963), it was originally developed for the proceedings of the 1953 psycholinguistics conference at the University of Indiana (Osgood, Seboek, & Diebold, 1965, p. 3).



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FIGURE 2. From report and recommendations of the Interdisciplinary Summer Seminar in Psychology and Linguistics, p. 7.

p. vii). Last, psycholinguistics would incorporate the techniques of information theory. From this perspective, the role of psycholinguistics would be to handle the translation of the behavior of the speaker or writer into the code of language and the decoding process of that language by the hearer or reader.7 If behaviorism and operationism defined psychology, linguistics, and their combination in the early 1950s, research on information theory would, by the middle of the decade, come to challenge the methodological orthodoxy of these fields. Psycholinguistics originally included information theory and did so under an interpretation that was compatible with both descriptive linguistics and behavioristic psychology. Indeed, the psycholinguistics program mapped out by Osgood and collaborators in the 1953 Indiana volume applied information theory by treating language as a Markov chain (Levelt, 2013, p. 9). Under this view, language could be understood by the transitional probabilities that linked an individual phoneme to an individual succeeding phoneme or an individual word to the succeeding word in the same way that behaviorists following Clark Hull accounted for physical behaviors (Osgood, Seboek, & Diebold, 1965, pp. 37, 93, 104, 118–119). Yet, as much as information theory formed a backbone of psycholinguistics and as much as Markov processes were central to the application of information theory in psycholinguistics, new research and interpretations of the theory would lead to a fundamental transformation of the field and to its reliance on a behavioristic framework. This transformation occurred because of the influential work of the psychologist George Miller. By the early 1950s, George Miller had established himself as one of the leading psychologists of language. He was one of the initial members of the SSRC committee on linguistics and psychology, but resigned after a year (Levelt, 2013). Miller had completed his doctoral work at Harvard’s Psychoacoustic Laboratory during World War II. There he studied the effects of noise on hearing and produced technologies from microphones and earphones to signal codes that would improve communication between speaker and hearer in adverse conditions (Edwards, 1996, pp. 210–218; Crowther-Heyck, 1999). Afterwards he quickly moved to introduce the war-time developments in information theory (Shannon, 1948) into psychology (Miller & Frick, 1949; Miller & Selfridge, 1950; Miller, Heise, & Lichten, 1951; Miller, 1953, 1956c). He also published a textbook on psychology communication and language (1951). By any estimation, Miller was one of the—if not the single—leading experts on the use of information theory in psychology and language. 7. “Minutes of the First Meeting,” December 5, 1952. Papers of the Social Science Research Council, Committee on Linguistics and Psychology, RG 1, Accession 1, Series 1, Subseries 19, Box 178, Folder 1045, Rockefeller Archive Center.


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FIGURE 3. The effect of information content on perception. From Miller (1951).

In his early works on the topic, Miller applied information theory by treating humans as information channels. So, Miller and his coauthors treated human behavior and language as Markov processes, asked about human channel capacity, and examined the rate at which humans might take input from the environment, the rate at which they might output information, and the statistical relationships among their behaviors (Miller & Frick, 1949; Miller, 1952, 1956a). One of Miller’s most widely cited results involved measuring the ability of humans to properly hear words in the context of noise. As shown in Figure 3, he and collaborators found that words that occurred as a part of a sentence were easier for subjects to perceive than isolated words. The authors concluded that the improvement in perception is a consequence of the sentence frame restricting the allowable vocabulary. They noted their finding was consistent with Claude Shannon’s account of mechanical communication systems (Shannon, 1948; Miller et al., 1951, pp. 334–335). Through the mid-1950s, Miller continued this pattern of applying information theory in a way that treated humans and inorganic communication machines as interchangeable. By early 1955, Miller had changed his mind. In April of that year he delivered a talk that became one of the most highly cited papers in the history of psychology, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” (Miller, 1956d). The first part of the paper accounts for Miller’s title—the magic number 7. In this segment, Miller surveyed the literature that had studied human psychology from the perspective of information theory. He then followed with the revolutionary part of the paper: he noted that although immediate memory is restricted by the number of items it can hold, the amount of information contained in each item is rather flexible. As Miller put it in a popular version of the paper, immediate memory is like a coin purse that can hold seven coins no matter if they are pennies or dollars (1956c, p. 8). Thus, information is not the proper metric to use for measuring human memory. As Miller subsequently explained to a group of communication engineers, humans do not have a fixed channel capacity—precisely because of our ability to recode (Miller, 1956a).8 In sum, Miller contended that humans are not at all like machines—as communication channels, humans change their qualities depending simply on how they think. If Miller’s introduction of information theory to psychology and subsequent reconception of information altered the course of psycholinguistics as framed by Osgood and Carroll, 8. Discussion of a broader move in the field of psychology away from the technical sense of information may be found in Collins (2007).



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even more significant was Miller’s interaction with the linguist Noam Chomsky. For it was their work individually and collaboratively that turned psycholinguistics away from its initial behaviorist orientation. Their collaboration began after they presented papers at a conference on information theory in September, 1956. At that conference, Miller again presented his findings on the magic number 7 (Miller, 1956b). The same day, Noam Chomsky delivered a paper titled “Three Models for the Description of Language.” The paper was organized as a hierarchy of linguistic theories starting with Markov processes, proceeding to phrase-structure grammars, and ending with transformational grammars, his own preferred theory. The paper functioned as a hierarchy because after introducing Markov processes and phrase-structure grammars, Chomsky then showed their inadequacies, including the inability to handle basic feature of English (Chomsky, 1956, pp. 114–116). This paper had the effect of being an antibehaviorist critique because of the linkage of Markov processes and behaviorism through the work of linguist Charles Hockett (Radick, n.d.). Chomsky only sharpened his criticism of behaviorism when he wrote a review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior for the journal Language (Chomsky, 1959). Although titled as a review of Skinner’s work, Chomsky directed most of his fire against other and more popular branches of behaviorism and especially the stimulus-response version that had inspired Charles Osgood.9 Following their joint appearance at the 1956 conference, Miller and Chomsky worked closely. They coauthored seminal papers in psycholinguistics (Chomsky & Miller, 1958, 1963; Miller & Chomsky, 1963), cited one another (Chomsky 1957a; Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1960, p. 144), and cotaught a summer course sponsored by the SSRC for psychology professors on the application mathematics in the social sciences. As both worked in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Miller at Harvard and Chomsky at MIT, they had ample opportunity to interact. While their very proximity and opportunity for face-to-face discussion limits the paper and archival traces of their conversations, the records we do have indicate that they shared a close fellowship in the years between 1956 and 1967 when Miller departed Cambridge for Rockefeller University. Miller noted the nature and scope of their interactions in a 1957 recommendation letter he wrote for Chomsky’s tenure case. I have known about Chomsky’s work for only two years. I spent the summer of 1956 studying a manuscript of a book which he has been writing for several years. It is novel and difficult stuff, but as I persevered, I gradually became convinced that his was the most original contribution to linguistics that I had ever seen. At that time I had agreed to teach a seminar at Stanford for the Social Science Research Council during the summer of 1957 on the applications of mathematics to language and communication. I was fortunately able to persuade Chomsky to accompany me there as my assistant on the seminar. It is hard to say who assisted whom; at any rate, I profited immensely from our collaboration and we accomplished a remarkable amount of collaborative work. I am currently devoting much of my research time to the possible implications of Chomsky’s ideas for psychology, so I feel deeply in his debt for the stimulation he has provided.10

9. Gregory Radick (n.d.) points out that Chomsky’s attack was also implicitly directed against the linguist Charles Hockett. 10. George Miller to W. N. Locke, October 29, 1957. George A. Miller, General Correspondence 1955–1957 (and some earlier) Box 2 of 2, folder: Recommendations. Harvard University Archives HUG 4571.5.


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In fact, as intimated by Miller’s recommendation for Chomsky, the primary program of psycholinguistics after 1956 was investigating the psychological reality of Chomsky’s version of linguistic theory (Brown, 1973, pp. 97–98; Harris, 2010, pp. 246–247).11 The association between Miller and Chomsky was close enough to be known to others in the Cambridge intellectual community. The relationship was close enough that, according to Miller’s recollection, B. F. Skinner believed that Miller was behind Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (Crowther-Heyck, 1999, p. 53). And, while Miller had seen the review before publication, he recalls having made Chomsky “take out some of the worst slurs before it was published” (Hébert, 2006; cited in Harris, 2010, p. 243). By the early 1960s, Miller and Chomsky led the second generation of psycholinguists to wage war against the behavioristic models of psychology and language of their first-generation predecessors. Second generation psycholinguists rejected behaviorist empiricism and adopted a rationalist epistemology both for their own scientific methods and as a characterization of how humans generally come to learn languages, speak, hear, and read. This antibehaviorist movement in psycholinguistics occurred in four primary ways. First, the Miller/Chomsky version of psycholinguistics held that language production of all humans is creative in the sense that children quickly learn to produce new and novel sentences appropriate to their native language (Berko & Brown, 1960, p. 517; Miller, 1964b, p. 32; also Chomsky, 1965, pp. 5–6).12 It was not, however, just any form of creativity that inspired these psycholinguists. It was that human language acquisition, production, and reception seemed to be equivalent to doing creative work in the sciences. Such creativity involved a model of science based on the production of novel hypotheses more than the careful accumulation of empirical evidence. It was, then, a model of science that fit with the kind of rationalist epistemology advocated by Chomsky but not the empiricism called for by his opponents, from B. F. Skinner to Leonard Bloomfield and his follower Charles Hockett (Radick, n.d.). This perspective—that humans were scientists of a particular sort—was central to Chomsky’s view of language (Chomsky, 1956, 1957b, 1962, 1958, pp. 25–25, 32). Chomsky was, however, no outlier in this rationalist way of understanding language as a matter of creative scientific production. Developmental psycholinguists Jean Berko and Roger Brown took childhood language acquisition to be equivalent to scientific investigation requiring the formation and testing of hypotheses. They even compared the process of learning a language to the activity of a “linguistic scientist” (1960, p. 517; Brown, 1958, p. 194). If second generation psycholinguistics took human language to be creative science, it was further inspired by studies that showed that even mechanical devices would require creative language abilities even to recognize speech. Indeed Morris Halle and Kenneth Stevens took this perspective when examining an artificial speech-recognition system. They suggested that the parsing of speech should be understood as substantively equivalent to discovering a mathematical proof. As they put it, the listener creates a phonemic representation of a segment of speech from a set of generative rules. After an iterative process of matching the representation to the signal and refining the representation, and matching again, the listener produces a final phonemic representation of the speech she had heard (1962). Their model of perception was subsequently picked up and “assumed” by Noam Chomsky and George Miller 11. For recent reminiscences see “Lives in Linguistics: An interview with Lila Gleitman,” May 11, 2009. Retrieved April 10, 2014, from http://news.uchicago.edu/multimedia/lives-linguistics-interview-lila-gleitman# sthash.YZAqItAG.dpuf. 12. Here the point is Chomsky’s interest in the creative production of theories of grammar that children accomplish as they learn to speak. Focusing on another matter, the production of sentences rather than the acquisition of grammar, John Joseph dates Chomsky’s interest in creativity to 1962 (Chomsky, 1962; Joseph, 2002).



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as the basis for their own work. Miller and Chomsky contended that what linguistics and psychology could do together was develop a model of perception as a hypothesis-generating device (Chomsky & Miller, 1963; Miller, 1964b, p. 31). Thus, from the most basic studies of word perception to the psycholinguistics of acquisition, production, and comprehension, academics of the 1960s were increasingly convinced that inference not only occurs but that it is essential to language. It is a process so important that language, at least the parts that matter, cannot occur without such guessing and hypothesis formation. This vision was not one in which science progressed by the accumulation of data. Nor was it one in which humans are passive beings, shaped by the environment. This was a vision of science and of human thought and perception in which theorizing selects, organizes, and shapes both observation and data. The second antibehaviorist aspect of second generation psycholinguistics advanced by Miller, Chomsky, and their followers was insistence that parsing at the level of phonemes or words was insufficient. By 1957, Miller was emphasizing in his lectures that psychologists, especially behaviorists, had erred in applying a reductionist strategy to language by treating speech sounds or words as the only phenomena worth analyzing. He showed his students that language science demanded analysis at four hierarchical levels at once: phonemes, word, phrase, and sentence.14 In published work as well Miller increasingly emphasized sentencelevel analysis. As discussed above, Miller had in 1951 demonstrated that perception operated according to the mathematical theory of communication as outlined by Claude Shannon (1948). Thus, even meaningless word combinations arranged in proper grammatical order could be better perceived, learned, and remembered than the same words when arranged in nongrammatical order. Miller had concluded that this was because when words were arranged in proper sentences there were fewer possible combinations than words arranged in random order. But by the early 1960s Miller altered his own interpretation, distancing himself both from behaviorism and from the perspective that information theory was a sufficient model for human language capacities. In the revised version of the experiment, Miller showed that subjects’ better recognition and memory of syntactically correct word strings could not be accounted for by information theory alone. He showed that sentences mattered not only because they were more redundant than a similar-length random collection of words. Indeed grammar, independent of information theory, had its own psychological significance that made words in proper sentences easier to hear and remember (Miller, 1962a, 1962b). In another widely cited study that also indicated the significance of parsing at the level of the sentence, Miller found that there was no obvious objective, mechanical way to translate speech into text or text into speech. Here, he noted that context determines the acoustic properties of phonemes to such an extent that to make a machine read text it would be necessary to equip it with the ability to conduct “rudimentary grammatical analysis” even before it began reading and speaking (Miller, 1958). Drawing on instances such as these, Miller emphasized the distance between human audition and mechanical speech perception. As he put it, “[H]ow can a machine tell the difference between ‘an aim’ and ‘a name’ or 13. Discussion of the assumption is in Semi-Annual Technical Report, July 1–December 31, 1963, p. 4. Jerome S. Bruner Papers Center for Cognitive Studies—Final Reports on Grants and Contracts, Folder: ARPA, Harvard University Archives. HUG 4242.54. 14. George Miller, “The Source of Messages”, Class Notes. Lecture for psychology 165: The psychology of speech and communication, Harvard University, Fall 1957. September 25, 1957. Harvard University Archives HUC 8957.272.165 Box 1247, Folder: Miller: Lecture Notes for Psych 165. Here, Miller cited, on the ambiguous nature of speech sounds, a paper by Chomsky’s wife (Schatz, 1954).


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between ‘fancy’ and ‘fan see’?” (Miller, 1958). Later Miller would argue that it was not the objective properties of speech sounds that mattered to language, but how speakers and listeners thought about those sounds (Miller, 1965, p. 15). By the early 1960s, Miller advanced a third antibehavioristic aspect of second-generation psycholinguistics. He contended that it was time to go beyond the information theoretic and “engineering” approach that he himself had been so central in developing and bringing to psychology (Miller, 1967b, p. 23). In making this argument, Miller emphasized the analysis of meaning, syntax, and semantics. He further defined “meaning” in a way that attacked the behavioristic studies of language, including those of Osgood (Miller, 1965). As early as 1957, students in the course Miller led with Chomsky as nominal assistant were characterizing Osgood’s vision of meaning as “vacuous.”15 Thus, Miller at once criticized the information theoretic approach to communication and defined psycholinguistics in such a way that Osgood and the behaviorists were excluded from this interdisciplinary field. The fourth and most fundamental issue that drove the move of psycholinguistics away from its initial form of combining Bloomfieldian descriptive linguistics and behaviorist psychology was the issue of language acquisition. A critical issue that antibehaviorist psycholinguistics grappled with was the fact that children learn language so quickly that they develop faster than the cognitive stages described by Jean Piaget (McNeill, 1966, p. 15). Articulating what came to be known as the “poverty of the stimulus argument,” Noam Chomsky remarked that children’s acquisition of grammar in their native language “is accomplished in an astonishingly short time” (Chomsky, 1959, p. 57). This phenomenon became a major point of contention between the theories of cognitively orientated linguists and the theories of language based in the conditioned learning that behaviorists focused on. As the argument went, children learn to speak grammatical sentences much faster than can be accounted for by stimulus-response learning (Miller, 1964a, pp. 98–99). In making this point, Miller contended that the behavioristic model of “stimulus generalization” was insufficient to explain such productivity.

TESTING PSYCHOLINGUISTICS: THE COMPUTER AND UNIVERSAL LANGUAGES While coteaching the SSRC seminar on the applications of mathematics in the social sciences in the summer of 1957, Miller and Chomsky developed a research program that would test the poverty-of-stimulus argument.16 This is how the research would operate: subjects would be presented with “sentences” of an artificial abstract grammar; they would then infer the grammar and, next, attempt to produce proper sentences of that grammar. The experimenter would inform the subject if he or she had produced proper sentences. Finally, the subject would declare if he or she had worked out the grammar’s rules. An example of such a grammar

15. Such was noted by Noam Chomsky in “Report of the Fourth Week,” Workshop on Language and Communication, 1957 Summer Institute on Applications of Mathematics in Social Scientific Research. Papers of the Committee on Mathematical Training of Social Scientists, Social Science Research Council. RG1, Accession 1, Series 1, Subseries 19, Box 180, Folder 1061. Rockefeller Archive Center. 16. Their proposal was a paper entitled “Pattern Conception.” It was presented to their students and at a University of Michigan conference on pattern perception. The paper is unpublished and copies do not remain in either Miller’s or Chomsky’s papers. It is discussed in Miller (1967a), and in the weekly and final reports of the Workshop on Language and Communication of the 1957 Summer Institute on Applications of Mathematics in Social Scientific Research. Papers of the Committee on Mathematical Training of Social Scientists, Social Science Research Council. RG1, Accession 1, Series 1, Subseries 19, Box 180, Folder 1061. Rockefeller Archive Center.



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might be of the form ABNA, where the letters form “words” (Miller, 1967a, pp. 129–130, 141–144).17 Almost immediately it became clear that it would be impossible for humans to run this experiment. The problem was that experimenters were not fast, reliable, or consistent enough to evaluate the “sentences” produced by subjects. The solution lay in the future, after Miller cofounded Harvard’s interdisciplinary Center for Cognitive Studies in 1960 and was able to secure funds from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the purchase of a digital programmable computer (Miller, 1967a, p. 157). The Center became an institutional home for the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. Over the following 12 years, the Center provided a meeting place and funding both for visiting senior scholars and for postdocs. Among the people trained in this setting were a younger generation of psycholinguists, including Dan Slobin, Jerry Katz, Jerry Fodor, David McNeil, Ursula Belligui, and Frank Smith. For his part, Chomsky visited at the Center during the 1964–1965 academic year while he was working on Cartesian Linguistics. This critical mass of cognitively oriented scholars studying language helps explain the rapid transformation in psycholinguistics away from the field’s initial behavioristic orientation.18 The largest amount of unrestricted funds at the Center came from a DARPA grant—to the tune of $125,000 per year. If given in 2103, the value of that grant would be $3,290,000 annually.19 That money went to support graduate students, postdocs, and the acquisition of expensive equipment. The largest part of that was devoted to the purchase of a PDP4—a so-called minicomputer the size of a refrigerator. This purchase represented an enormous step in the history of psychological laboratories. Miller recounts that this was only the second computer anywhere that was dedicated to psychological research (Miller, Norman, & Bregman, 1965). While the computer ended up serving as the control device for using studies on human acquisition of artificial grammar to test the poverty of stimulus argument, Miller’s initial hopes for it were much grander. As initially planned, the computer would realize two primary goals for researchers at the Center. The Center would use the computer to expand on the artificial intelligence work that Alan Newell and Herbert Simon had been conducting on simulating cognitive processes. Second, the computer offered the most grandiose of possibilities for Center members: it would, they hoped, enable the development of a universal and rigorous language for the social sciences. In so doing, the computer would fulfill the greatest interdisciplinary ambitions of psycholinguistics. It was, in fact, the development of a formal and rigorous language for the social sciences that provided the grant’s initial raison d’être. Miller’s version of psycholinguistics would, then, not only seek to understand the psychological reality of Chomskyian linguistics, it would also develop a general scientific language for use in all the social sciences. As Miller’s grant application noted, notation and formal languages drive scientific research to such an extent that they shape the very questions and models scientists develop. Thus, “algebra could not flourish until Arabic notation replaced Roman notation for integers; mathematics was not a precise science until the calculus was invented; chemistry was materially advanced by a simple convention for representing valences and chemical bonds; etc.” The grant proposal continued

17. The frame of looking for problem-solving strategies as subjects seek to discover a given abstract rule was drawn from Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin (1956). 18. Further discussion of the Center can be found in Cohen-Cole (2007). 19. This calculation uses share of GDP for the cost comparison.


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with suggestion that the behavioral sciences needed their own formal language.20 It seemed the formal language would be found among the newly emerging languages for computer programming. So hopeful was Miller about such possibilities that one year into the grant he suggested that computer-programming languages might not only rigorously describe the human language user, they could even provide a theoretical metalanguage that would unify and clarify work in all of the behavioral sciences.21 Yet, however, much Miller and his collaborators aimed to use the computer to unify psychology, linguistics, and even all of the social sciences, this goal proved unreachable. Indeed, not only did the computer prove a poor tool for generating unity in these fields, but the efforts at generating interdisciplinary synthesis actually drove researchers away from one another. The first stage of this division occurred with the failure of the project’s lofty goals of simulation and development of a theoretical language for the behavioral sciences. As it happened, Center researchers came to recognize that simulation would require an explicit and exhaustive accounting of human thought—an account that the Center researchers were unwilling or unprepared to provide. They also failed in the simulation of human language use as well. By the spring of 1965, George Miller was making disparaging comments in the relative privacy of his classes about the project of simulation of human thought processes and of Herbert Simon’s project in particular.22 Additionally, the plan for making computer languages a universal notation for the behavioral sciences also evaporated—within only a year. Not only had Miller and his collaborators been unsuccessful, they had even failed in the less ambitious goal of developing a computer language for the description of human languages and linguistic performance.23 No longer would the computer be an instrument for simulation of human psychological processes or for working out a scientific notation for general use in the social sciences. Instead, it would be simply used to make calculations and to perform as a real-time control in psycholinguistic studies. It would now serve as a central instrument in the Center’s research agenda of testing the psychological reality of Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories. In this capacity, the computer would display sentences to test subjects. It would record their responses and reaction times. One project was the computer implementation of “Project Grammarama”—the research program that had gone nowhere since it was initially proposed by Miller and Chomsky in 1957. Once underway, this research had some interesting results. It demonstrated, once again, that behavioristic theories of conditioning are insufficient to explain learning. Second, it provided an opportunity to confirm that human learning does not conform to what the mechanical, information theoretic model would predict. The computer also helped implement a procedure that assumed the poverty of stimulus and then proceeded to treat subjects as scientists.24 The work of checking the psychological reality of Chomsky’s theories went, largely, badly for Chomsky and transformed psycholinguistics in the process. The computer showed that the time it took subjects to recognize or remember sentences was not directly related to 20. Grant Proposal to the Department of Defense, Advanced Research Projects Agency, “Research on the Use of Formal Languages in the Behavioral Sciences,” March 25, 1963, p. 1. Jerome S. Bruner Papers Center for Cognitive Studies—Final Reports on Grants and Contracts, Folder: ARPA, Harvard University Archives. HUG 4242.54. 21. Ibid., p. 3. 22. Jerome S. Bruner Papers, Social Sciences 8, lecture 38. P.6, April 15, 1965. Harvard University Archives. 23. “Semi-Annual Technical Report” July 1–December 31, 1964, p. 2. Jerome Bruner Papers. Center for Cognitive Studies—Final Reports on Grants and Contracts, Folder: ARPA, HUG 4242.54. 24. The earliest results are reported in Miller and Stein (1963).



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the syntactic elements that were central to Chomsky’s theories. Instead, it was the semantic referents and truth values of the sentences that mattered (Miller, 1964a, p. 105). Similarly, subjects were much better at learning completely artificial symbolic grammars if they were attached to semantic values. These results were being reported to patrons by the middle of 1964. The computer, having failed as a simulator of human language and of cognition, did play one constructive role. It drove a wedge between psychology and Noam Chomsky’s linguistics by showing the importance of meaning to language use and acquisition.25 Thus, while it helped cement the views of Miller and his students that human language is a creative and nonmechanical process, it also helped bring to a close the generation of psycholinguistics that had been focused on the interdisciplinary combination of cognitive psychology and Chomskyian linguistics. Thus, as we have seen, the field of psycholinguistics consolidated in a few ways. While the field began as an effort to marry structural linguistics and behavioristic psychology and to use information theory to support this marriage, psycholinguistics moved to using information theory to critique behaviorism and then to adopting and testing the psychological reality of Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories. Within the fields of psychology and linguistics, these developments had significant effects. They undergirded a move from an empiricist to a rationalist mode of understanding the human mind and memory. They pushed the field of experimental psychology away from behaviorism and toward cognitive psychology and cognitive science. And, ultimately, the use of and familiarity with information technology pushed George Miller away from seeing humans as mechanical information channels and helped dissolve the psycholingusitics research agenda he had fashioned with Noam Chomsky. In sum, these events returned to American psychology and linguistics a focus on mind as an active, creative, nonmechanical, and autonomous agent. READING INSTRUCTION AND THE APPLICATION OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS If developments within the academy reshaped accounts of human nature within the basic disciplines, they also led to a set of developments in the applied domain that would be extremely contentious. The most politicized of these applications was in the area of language instruction— specifically, in reading. Here psycholinguistics and its enthusiastic adopters waded into a political and cultural field that had become contentious by the middle of 1950s and quickly thoroughly politicized shortly afterward. The question was, how should beginning readers be taught? One view was that phonics was the best method. According to this perspective, students should focus on learning the correspondences between written text and the sound of spoken language. Generally this technique involves students’ memorizing the sounds of letters and their combinations. Reading then occurs when students can take a given written word, break it into its constituent phonemes, pronounce the phonemes, and hence say the word. Opposed to this method was the “word,” “sight,” “look-say,” or “whole language” method, which seeks to have children read entire words without having to decompose them into their constituent sounds. The argument for the phonics method was that it allowed new readers to have to memorize only the roughly 40 different ways of representing English phonemes in writing. After readers 25. Quarterly report, January 1–March 31, 1964. DARPA Contract # SD 187, p.1. The outcome of this research may also explain why Chomsky was at one point a supporter of the investigations of the psychological reality of his theories, but by the early 1970s dismissed such investigations as “stupid” (Harris, 2010, p. 259).


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accomplish that relatively basic memorization, any of the thousands of words that children know how to speak could be “sounded out” and understood when encountered in text. Phonics advocates contended that without attention to the phonetic representation of words in text, children seeking to learn to read English would be in the position of Chinese speakers trying to read Chinese: they would have to memorize thousands of correspondences between the sounds of individual words and their written forms. On the other hand, the argument for the word method of reading instruction was that reading should be a process of understanding the meaning of a text. Since meaning is located at the level of words, phrases, or sentences, excessive attention to pronunciation would be a distraction and possibly prevent the reader from understanding a text. Further, experimental studies showed that subjects perceive words all at once, not letter by letter; do not scan text continuously from left to right; and recognize letters twice as fast when they form words than when they do not (Cattell, 1885; Erdmann & Dodge, 1898; Huey, 1900). Taken together, these findings indicated that letters are properly perceived when they are part of words and that even instructing beginning readers to focus on letters and phonemes would inhibit their ability to perceive and then to understand text. As Roger Brown puts it, these findings suggested that the “scientific” approach was to teach via the word method (1958, p. 67). In the decade after World War II, even though the word method seemed to be best aligned with scientific results, nevertheless the teaching of reading remained pluralist. Studies found that phonics was used in most schools. Indeed, 98 percent of schools taught phonics (Stephens, 1959, p. 117). Leading textbooks on reading suggested using phonics, and the teachers’ manuals of all eight major reading curricula included phonics instruction (N. B. Smith, 1955, pp. 73–75). Further, in the 1930s and 1940s a majority and increasing percentage of articles in professional journals advocated phonics (Romer, 1971, p. 402). Yet, the fact that phonics shared the stage with other methods of reading instruction made author Rudolph Flesch very angry. In 1955, he published the bestselling Why Johnny Can’t Read. In this book Flesch held that the only way to teach reading was through phonics. He contended that there were precisely zero instances of remedial readers in countries that used phonic methods of reading instruction: Germany, France, Italy, Norway, Spain, and the United States before 1925—the date when Flesch said phonics was supplanted by the word method (p. 2). What, Flesch asked, did the word method teach, if not phonics and reading? The answer he gave was “word guessing” (Flesch, 1955, p. 17). As Flesch saw it, the continued existence of word-method teaching could only be explained by a conspiracy of a corrupt cadre of reading teachers and publishers who knowingly blinded themselves to evident facts and, in the process, harmed America’s children. Not only did educators defy logic, according to Flesch, but they willfully ignored evidence that phonics worked (pp. 8–9). So too, Flesch charged, did reading teachers ignore Leonard Bloomfield, “universally recognized as the greatest American linguist of modern times,” because, perhaps, of his support for phonics (Flesch, 1955, pp. 9–10). Almost every mention of “expert” in Why Johnny Can’t Read drips with venom. Thus, the word goes in scare quotes (pp. 58, 61, 124), as does “authority” (p. 123). Contending that reading experts were antiscientific, Flesch argued, “Their minds are filled with preconceived notions, they have an utter disregard for facts, and they are unwilling to learn anything.” Thus, “the true facts are concealed” (p. 61). He knew this because, as he puts it, “in every single research study ever made phonics was shown to be superior to the word method; conversely, there is not a single research study that shows the word method superior to phonics.” Flesch knew as much because he had spent “a few hours in the library” tracking down “every single



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reference” to “phonics versus no phonics” and found that there was absolutely zero “scientific evidence” in favor of the word method (p. 60). This critique combined to lead to Flesch’s ultimate criticism: those who wear the mantle of expert or authority in reading do not deserve the title. As he puts it at the end of the book, “[T]here are only two kinds of experts worth listening to when it comes to reading: linguists and psychologists.” Flesch goes on to note that linguists are “unanimous” in agreeing that phonics is the only way to teach (pp. 123–124). As for psychologists, Flesh dismisses out of hand those who are involved in education. The ones of interest to him are the specialists in the human mind—the experimentalists (p. 124). Although his work was widely read, it also received strong criticism not only from the reading experts he attacked, but also from intellectuals writing either in their own fields or for a popular audience. Lois Rettie, the New Republic reviewer, argued that Flesch was a “master of the art of controversy,” that the methods he advocated had been tried already, and that his most central arguments were simply “formidable nonsense” (1955). Other reviewers made much the same points. Willard Olson, the reviewer for Contemporary Psychology, the American Psychological Association’s journal devoted to book reviews, commented that contrary to Flesch’s contentions, there were in fact reading problems in Europe, that experimental results do not demonstrate that phonics is superior, and that the word method was not the only method used in the United States (1956). One of the stronger critiques Flesch received came from John Carroll, the head of the SSRC committee on psycholinguistics. Carroll began by pointing out the other reviews that had noted the ways in which Flesch had “distorted and misrepresented the research evidence concerning the teaching of reading” (1956, p. 158). He went on to note that such misrepresentation was a violation of the American Psychological Association’s published ethical standards and that Flesch had been a member of the association from 1945 to 1953. However, one element that did not appear in the reviews—for its results were yet to be known—was that psychologists and linguists were not so clearly supportive of Bloomfield as they had been in the years preceding Flesch’s book. The most critical developments here were the rise of transformational generative linguistics under the leadership of Noam Chomsky, the attack on the Bloomfieldian linguistic program led by Chomsky and his students, and the changes in psychology of learning and thinking instituted by cognitive psychology.26 Each of these came only after 1955, the year Flesch published his book. They did, however, set the stage for a new understanding of mind, language, and reading. This understanding appeared first in the Chomsky/Miller version of psycholinguistics and subsequently in the influence of their mode of psycholinguistics on the field of language instruction in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Psycholinguistics in the Chomsky/Miller mode led directly into research on reading and then into reading instruction in several ways. Three of these were in terms of personnel: Frank Smith, Kenneth Goodman, and Paul Kolers. Both Goodman and Kolers worked with Miller. From 1962 through 1964, Kolers was a research fellow at the Center for Cognitive Studies that was codirected by George Miller. After that, Kolers moved to MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics and Department of Electrical Engineering. For his part, Smith’s doctoral dissertation was directed by Miller. For Goodman, the uptake of the Chomsky/Miller mode of psycholinguistics was slightly less direct. Goodman was trained in the theory and practice of education at UCLA. Goodman sought to bring the insights of linguistics into the practice of reading instruction after his 26. On the Bloomfieldian program and the rise of the Chomskyian approach see Harris (1993).


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FIGURE 4. Chomsky’s model of sentence interpretation.

appointment at Wayne State University. The science, he hoped, might help explain the modes of reading he observed in Detroit schools. Goodman aimed to demonstrate by the very errors that his readers made that their interaction with the text was a constructive process and contended that the errors readers produce were not ones of not knowing how to properly recognize or pronounce words. Instead, readers always subconsciously substituted their own subcultural dialect and manner of speech and understanding for the text on the page (Goodman, 1964) (See figure 4). In 1965, Goodman organized a conference on psycholinguistics. Attendees, including Paul Kolers, brought Goodman into contact with the then current research and cemented his preexisting understanding of reading. Additionally, in the summer of 1965 Goodman attended a federally sponsored interdisciplinary working group at Cornell entitled “Project Literacy.” Noam Chomsky was there for three days and Goodman recalls that “Chomsky’s characterization of reading brought things together for me” (Goodman, 2000, p. 2). The Cornell conference cemented Goodman’s understanding of how to teach reading. The approach at the conference would be to examine adult readers, assess their skills, and then seek to close the distance between what they could do and what the children who were seeking to learn to read could do. Conference attendees began with the Miller/Chomsky view that individuals parse individual words by relying on its syntactic and semantic contexts.27 Following this conference, Goodman then began publishing on psycholinguistics and reading. This work, the first of his that explicitly addressed “psycholinguistics,” depended directly on the research of Miller and Chomsky (Goodman, 1967). In his introduction of psycholinguistics to the reading-instruction community, Goodman made a concerted attack on phonics as a “na¨ıve,” commonsense notion that would be swept away by a more scientific approach (1967, p. 126). In a later article with Frank Smith, he made a similar argument by asserting that the psycholinguistic approach to reading would be the one that is “synonymous with ‘objective,’ ‘analytical,’ or ‘scientific’” (1971, p. 180). The misconception that Goodman sought to refute was held by phonics advocates that “reading is a precise process” that is determined by the careful and sequential identification of letters. A second part of the unscientific, commonsense view that he sought to overturn was the view that errors people make in reading a text indicate “that the reader does not know something or that he has been ‘careless’” (Goodman, 1967, pp. 126–127). Thus, if it was not a process of the precise translation of text into speech or into thought, what, then, was reading for Goodman? It was a “psycholinguistic guessing game” that involved the skilled selection of a few cues to make for correct guesses about the text. To illustrate his account of the reading process, Goodman reproduced a diagram by Noam Chomsky on how listeners parse speech. This diagram was originally presented in a lecture by Chomsky

27. “Summary, Summer Seminar, 1965,” pp. 1–2. Harry Levin Papers, Box 11, Folder #33. Cornell University Archives.


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at the 1965 Project Literacy conference that Goodman attended. This was not a theory of reading that made viewing a text a matter of precise but passive perception. Instead, the process of text perception was an active process that involved anticipation, gap filling, and guessing (Goodman, 1967, pp. 126–127).29 By carefully tracking the “miscues” readers made, Goodman argued that they were not simple errors, but indications of the specific ways that readers decode texts by sampling the text and then inferring the meaning of entire sentences before perceiving or reading individual words (Goodman, 1967, p. 129). For Frank Smith, the introduction to psycholinguistics started with his doctoral training at Harvard under the direction of George Miller. Beyond Miller, Smith worked with Jerome Bruner, T. G. R. Bower, and Daniel Kahneman. From Miller, Smith would have learned the most up-to-date research on the psychology of language. From Bruner and Kahneman, Smith would have learned the leading methods of perceptual research—especially in the field of vision. From this latter group, Smith adopted in his dissertation the perspective that perception is an active, constructive process (F. Smith, 1967). Later, drawing from George Miller’s account of the limited span of immediate memory, Smith contended that use of phonic methods would so slow down the reader that he or she would have short-term memory overloaded and thus lose the meaning of the sentence (1971, p. 170). For his part, Paul Kolers introduced experimental results on vision from his own research to argue that the process of reading is an active, constructive process. After recruiting bilingual French-English speakers, Kolers asked them to read aloud passages in French and passages in English. In both instances, subjects properly pronounced what they read. Then Kolers gave his research subjects passages to read that mixed English and French in a single sentence. Here is a portion of such a passage. His horse, followed de deux bassets, faisait la terre résonner under its even tread. Des gouttes de verglas stuck to his manteau. Une violente brise was blowing. Kolers found that subjects who had previously had good pronunciation now consistently mispronounced words. They read English words with a French accent and vice versa. And the cause of the errors was not that the subjects were reverting to their native tongues. For instance, Americans, on seeing “black” said “block.” Both English and French native speakers pronounced what could only be French words as if they were English words (Kolers, 1971, pp. 12–13). From these results, Kolers concluded that “printed words themselves do not convey any information about how they should be pronounced” (p. 13). Instead, these findings indicate that readers determine how to pronounce the words they encounter from larger contexts. Kolers then added recent evidence from studies that tracked eye movements as speed readers read text passages. The numbers in the figure below indicate the locations and order of where one subject fixed her eyes on a page of text. Kolers noted that for other pages of text the subject had a quite different pattern. Rather than moving down the left page, in that instance her eyes moved back and forth between the right and left pages (See figure 5). These results indicated to Kolers that there is no necessary order in which the eye takes in information from a page of text. Instead, the reader gathers “clues” about the text and then constructs a “representation” of what the text is about (p. 14). Kolers was not alone in this work. His

28. “Notes on Chomsky Talk,” June 18, 1965, p.1. Harry Levin Papers, Box 11, Folder #80. Cornell University Archives. 29. Goodman credits this diagram to an unpublished lecture Chomsky gave at Cornell University for Project Literacy on June 18, 1965.


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FIGURE 5. Eye motion study showing the pattern readers’ eyes take.

colleagues at the Center for Cognitive Studies also showed that the movement of eyes during reading does not proceed from left to right (Mehler, Bever, & Carey, 1967). By the middle 1970s, based on work such as this, psycholinguistics had made significant inroads into the practice of reading instruction. For the community of reading teachers, psycholinguistics had specific implications: it meant the combination of cognitive psychology with the program of linguistics launched by Noam Chomsky (Cooper & Petrosky, 1976, p. 185). As such, the reading-instruction community absorbed what was, by then, the majority and most powerful version of psycholinguistics. But, at the same time, it slighted earlier versions of psycholinguistics dependent on neither cognitive psychology nor Chomsky. Further, these reading instructors noticed certain psycholinguistic principles: in both reading and learning to speak, children engage in a process of hypothesis-testing either to perceive language or to discover the rules by which their language operates (Cooper & Petrosky, 1976, p. 188). This particular view aligned the psycholinguistic version of language instruction with the psychological view that thinking itself is a process of gap filling, and with the pedagogical camp that emphasized active learning as superior to passive absorption (F. Smith & Goodman, 1971, p. 179). In fact, reading theorists concluded that to best teach reading, students should be encouraged to “rely on as little visual information as possible” (Cooper & Petrosky, 1976, p. 194).30 Because memory and visual processing are weak, proper use of cognitive skills could remove the load from the visual system and from memory to then allow those with skill to read at an accelerated pace. THE POLITICS OF PHONICS By the late 1960s, the relationship between the sciences of psychology and linguistics, on the one hand, and reading instruction, on the other, was quite different than had been outlined by Rudolph Flesch. No longer was Leonard Bloomfield the preeminent linguist in America. 30. This argument on the virtues of recoding to lessen the load on immediate memory does not cite, but echoes, George Miller’s most famous work (Miller, 1956c, 1956d).



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Nor was the behaviorist-inspired rote memorization advocated in Bloomfield’s reading textbook the leading approach to pedagogy (Bloomfield & Barnhart, 1961, pp. 34–35). While Bloomfield had contended that starting with the mechanical elements was the best way to teach anything from reading to mathematics to piano, much pedagogical theory of the 1960s contended that instruction centered on meaning would be most effective. Over the course of the 1960s, the new cognitive psychology came to support this attention to meaning over rote memorization and noted the ways in which children’s memory improves in situations where they understand the fundamental principles of the fields they study (Bruner, 1966). For this reason, the new pedagogy sought to teach grammar to elementary school children by introducing them to Chomskian linguistics (Cohen-Cole, 2014, p. 201). These pedagogical principles similarly informed advocates of the word method in reading (Kolers, 1971, pp. 15–16). For the most politically active advocates of phonics, these were not salutary developments. Rather, in their view they marked a threat to the American way of life. Already in 1955, Rudolph Flesch had contended that the word method was “destroying democracy in this country; it returns to the upper middle class privileges that public education was supposed to distribute evenly among the people.” For Flesch, this destruction of democracy was caused by ignorance, not by Communists, “wickedness or malice.” (pp. 32–33). If Flesch refrained from red-baiting, other phonics advocates did not. Support of phonicsbased education became an article of faith for the newly emergent right wing of the 1950s and 1960s. Learning about the issue from reading Flesch himself, conservative grassroots organizer Phyllis Schlafly advocated phonics as part of her earliest political activities. Indeed, doing so helped introduce Schlafly to a life in politics (Critchlow, 2005). Schlafly and like-minded conservatives emphasized that education required basic training in the fundamentals—which, in the case of reading instruction, meant phonics. For Schlafly, the problem with school experts was that they substituted nonacademic courses, such as “life adjustment” for academics, undermined traditional values, and lost the distinction between true and false. She blamed “the John Dewey school of education which taught that there is no such thing as right or wrong, there are no absolutes, and no standards of achievement” (Critchlow, 2005, pp. 33, 77). For members of the far right such as Schlafly, this charge was synonymous with the charge of communism. For conservatives ranging from William F. Buckley to popular writers and political organizers, the pedagogy influenced by John Dewey was nothing more than propaganda for socialism or even an effort by the Communist fifth column to weaken America (Hartman, 2008, pp. 99–103). Education writer and John Birch society member Samuel Blumenfeld would popularize the view that the word method of reading weakened the United States. Indeed, he devoted almost an entire book to the argument that the word method created not only dyslexia, but also juvenile delinquency (1973). Subsequently other conservatives, Schlafly included, would join Blumenfeld in blaming liberals for having created juvenile delinquency by failing to use phonics (Schlafly, 1994). For Blumenthal, this was no accident but part of a plan. To his eyes, phonics was individualist and part of the free enterprise system. In contrast, the word method was socialist. However, Blumenthal saw a deeper conspiracy than the brainwashing that the far right typically attributed to the public schools. He contended that progressive educators— starting with Dewey, the National Education Association, and experimental psychologists— knew that their methods would produce illiteracy, but they proceeded nevertheless (Blumenfeld, 1984, pp. 98–101, 108, 116, 119). One of the ways that Blumenfeld knew that the word method aimed to produce illiteracy was “evidence” he collected that its pedagogical theorists cared little about the difference JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs

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between right and wrong, correct and incorrect. His evidence for this was quotations from Edmund Burke Huey, an early word-method advocate. Blumenfeld then commented that Huey and his followers cared less about “what the author has to say” than “what the reader thinks.” For Blumenfeld that meant that Huey believed “each reader is free to interpret, ‘each in his own way’ the message of a written page” (1984, pp. 102–103). Even worse in Blumenfeld’s eyes was Huey’s call for reading to be understood as “thought getting” rather than “word pronouncing.” For Blumenfeld, the devious nature of educational progressives who advocated the word method appeared even in their renaming of their programs. Thus, what was once “whole word” or “look-say” became “psycholinguistics.” Although Blumenfeld believed the word method sought to camouflage itself by calling itself “psycholinguistics,” it was not similarly shy about its goals and methods of instruction. Blumenfeld was happy that Kenneth Goodman was “honest” in naming his most famous article “Reading, a Psycholinguistic Guessing Game” (1967). Blumenfeld was pleased about this because it allowed him to underline his point that reading is sounding out and is not a matter of guessing or hypothesis-making. According to him, it was precisely to avoid guessing that “the alphabet was invented. Once you are trained in translating written sound symbols into the exact spoken words they represent, precision in reading becomes automatic” (1984, p. 125). Thus, according to Blumenfeld, the importance of phonics is that it is the one and only route to getting to the true meaning of a given text. Although Blumenfeld had identified, correctly, the tolerance of people like Goodman for the errors that children make in reading, one thing he did not know is that research psycholinguists not only were accepting of nonperfect fidelity, but also were actually excited when they encountered their subjects making errors. This was because psycholinguists used the systematic nature of the errors children made not only to prove that they were autonomous thinkers, but also as data for understanding children’s cognitive processes (Berko & Brown, 1960, p. 520). Thus psycholinguistics, in its search for understanding human language use, placed just as much emphasis on errors as on the human capacity for hypothesis-making. Both errors and hypothesis-making showed human creativity and autonomy. CONCLUSION This article has examined how, over the course of the twentieth century, the debate over language instruction has engaged what is a broader question of the politics of epistemology. The question here was: How should children be understood? For proponents of the new cognitive psychology and George Miller’s brand of psycholinguistics, children should be understood not only as active, autonomous agents, but also as creative, inventive scientists. Conversely, psycholinguists’ opponents in the fields of psychology and, later, of reading instruction took children to be, or argued that they should be, passive agents, subject to experience, and tutored or trained by their elders. This was, then, a debate between rationalism and empiricism. It was a debate about which was best as scientific method, about who got to count as a scientist, and about which mode of epistemology should be imposed or cultivated in children. And this was highly political not only as a matter for academic debate, but also in terms of national interests. By 1969, when Miller delivered his presidential address calling for giving psychology away, he had largely won the battle over psycholinguistics. He, along with Chomsky, had succeeded in overturning the behaviorist vision of language. In order to do so, they showed the ways that humans are at every moment making hypotheses, whether in perceiving a segment of speech or in learning how to speak a specific language properly. This perspective found its way into scientific journals as well as into whole-language instruction. Miller saw the cognitive JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs


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vision of human nature as leading to democracy and, as articulated in his address, saw the child-centered reading typical of whole-language instruction as the most scientific, effective, and democratic way to proceed in education. For Flesch and Blumenfeld, teaching reading through phonics was a part of their vision of American society. Since the 1980s, the teaching of phonics has become an article of faith, especially for fundamentalist Christians (Weaver & Brinkley, 1998). Almost all pedagogical programs that self-classify as teaching from the Christian perspective are phonics based. A survey conducted by Christian educator Mark Thogmartin gives another explanation for the more recent affiliation of conservative Christians and phonics. Thogmartin reported that Christian educational theorist and pedagogical leader Jim Davis noted that Christians should oppose whole-language methods because this pedagogy seeks to enable children to develop “autonomy in order to think and make decisions for [themselves]” (1994, p. 111). This perspective appears especially in the pedagogical decisions of Christian home schooling and echoes Tim LaHaye’s contention that autonomy is a humanistic, atheistic, and anti-Christian value (LaHaye, 1980, pp. 96, 117; Stevens, 2001, p. 64). Why, then, do conservatives align themselves with phonics? Why have the Republican study committee and Samuel Blumenfeld identified psycholinguistics as undermining the form of society they desire? One answer is that there has been a long-term relationship between phonics instruction and Christianity. Indeed, Christian missionary Frank Laubach developed written languages for cultures that lacked them, translated the Bible into those languages, and then used phonics techniques to teach members of that culture to read. He subsequently developed a reputation in the United States for having taught millions of people to read (Medary, 1954). Rudolph Flesch credited Laubach’s phonics techniques for teaching “half the world to read” (Flesch, 1955, p. 23). From this perspective, the practical reasons to support phonics extended beyond any particular religious or political perspective to the empirical evidence drawn from missionary work of teaching reading through phonics. Another reason that conservatives since Phyllis Schalfly have attached themselves to phonics is that they have associated the word method with John Dewey, humanism, and socialism. To this extent, their advocacy of phonics is a reaction against the politics of advocates of alternate programs. Indeed, Schlafly, Flesh, and Blumenfeld, like Miller, saw reading, citizenship, and democracy as intimately linked. And this is why they invested so much energy in promoting the reading-instruction programs that seemed to them to be most effective. Where Miller believed that the greatest problems in the world were human creations and therefore demanded the reorganization of social institutions, leading conservative thinkers contended that the mere identification of problems as created by and solvable by humans to be tantamount to an atheistic humanism devoted to a socialistic one-world government (LaHaye, 1980). While an outlier at the time, Blumenfeld’s association of psycholinguistics with socialism, social disorder, and illiteracy became incorporated into and even taken for granted among the far right in American society. His views have been echoed by luminaries of the conservative movement ranging from Schlafly to the television evangelist and one-time Republican candidate for president, Pat Robertson. Indeed, Blumenfeld’s views on whole-language instruction and even his attack on the field of psycholinguistics was approvingly cited and incorporated wholesale into a policy document approved by the Republican Party’s Senate Policy Study Committee in 1989 (Weaver & Brinkley, 1998).31 Since that time, attachment to phonics-based 31. This paper was authored by Robert Sweet of the National Right to Read Foundation but published as Senator William Armstrong, Illiteracy: An Incurable Disease or Education Malpractice?, Washington, DC: U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee, 1989.


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curricula has only become more entrenched among conservatives. Indeed, so closely connected has phonics become to conservative Christian pedagogy that it is no longer a point of debate inside this community (Thogmartin, 1994, p. 103). However, the reason that phonics advocates adopt their position is not simply a matter of authority, nor is it only a matter that their vision of citizenship and society is the polar opposite of the vision of society and citizenship promoted by Miller and whole-language advocates. It is also the case that the field of reading instruction is not unified. So fraught has this struggle been that partisans both inside and outside the academy cannot agree on what counts as a scientific study and what does not, nor on what should count as evidence and what should not (Carbo, 1988; Chall, 1989; Kim, 2008). Thus, if Miller’s versions of human language processes, epistemology, and science succeeded in closing debate within the research fields of psychology and linguistics, this vision of thought and language has not succeeded as well in the applied world of reading. There has been and continues to be an unending battle between the rationalist, top-down epistemology that characterizes both Miller’s work and whole-language instruction, on the one hand, and the bottom-up, empiricist epistemology favored by phonics advocates, on the other. The debate over how children best learn to read remains as live in the pedagogical and policy worlds as it was before the birth of psycholinguistics.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author thanks Philippe Fontaine for suggestions and corrections. Thanks as well to MIchael Horka and Jessica Price for their research help.

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