George A. Miller
July 11, 2009
George Armitage Miller was born
February 3, 1920, in Charleston, West Virginia. In 1940 he received a Bachelor
of Arts degree from the University of Alabama and in 1946 he received his Ph.D.
in Psychology from Harvard University.
At Harvard, during and after
World War II, he studied speech production and perception. In 1948 C. E.
Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication inspired a series of experiments
measuring how far a listener’s expectations influence his perceptions. Miller summarized
that work in 1951 in “Language and Communication,” a text that helped to
establish psycholinguistics as an independent field of research in psychology.
He subsequently tried to extend Shannon’s measure of information to explain
short-term memory, work that resulted in a widely quoted (and often misquoted)
paper, “The
Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.”
Miller’s attempts to estimate
the amount of information per word in conversational speech led him to Noam
Chomsky, who showed him how the sequential predictability of speech follows
from adherence to grammatical, not probabilistic, rules. The next decade was
spent testing psychological implications of Chomsky’s theories. Some of those
ideas found expression in 1960 in “Plans and the Structure of Behavior,” a book
written jointly with E. Galanter and K. Pribram. In 1960 Miller was co-founder,
along with J. S. Bruner, of the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies. On
the basis of these activities, Miller is generally considered one of the
fathers of modern cognitive psychology. In 1962 he was elected to the National
Academy of Science.
Miller visited The Rockefeller
University in New York in 1967, and in 1968 decided to stay there as Professor
of Experimental Psychology. In 1969 he was elected President of the American
Psychological Association. By then his research interests had shifted from
grammar to lexicon, and in 1976 “Language and Perception,” written with P. N. Johnson-Laird,
presented a detailed hypothesis about the way lexical information is stored in
a person’s long-term memory. Miller attempted to test some aspects of the
hypothesis with studies of the development of language in young children; that project was
summarized in 1977 in “Spontaneous Apprentices: Children and Language.” During
this time, he served as a consultant to the Sloan Foundation in the program
that helped to create the new field of cognitive science.
In 1979 Miller moved to
Princeton University, where he is now James S. McDonnell Distinguished
University Professor of Psychology, Emeritus. In 1986, in collaboration with
Gilbert Harman, he established the Princeton Cognitive Science Laboratory. In 1990 he wrote
“The Science of Words,” which won the William James Book Award from
Division 1 of the American Psychological Association. In 1991 he was awarded
the National Medal of Science by President Bush.
From 1989 to 1994 Miller served
as Program Director of the McDonnell-Pew Program in Cognitive Neuroscience. His
own research has produced WordNet, a lexical database that is widely used by
computational linguists as part of natural language processing systems;
Miller’s current interest is to use WordNet to identify the intended senses of
polysemous words on the basis of their contexts of use.
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