Communication Theory, Linguistics, and Psycholinguistics

THE inclusion in this REVIEW, for the first time, of a chapter on communication theory, linguistics, and psycholinguistics is motivated by the notable expansion of work in these areas and the increasing promise of payoff in many fields of education, not only in the so-called language arts, but also in the analysis of the educative process itself. Communication is a word that crops up with increasing frequency in educational literature, almost as if it were a magic key to wisdom. Communication theorists themselves have been given to holding symposia and conferences (35, 47) in the course of which they suggest the wide-ranging implications of this theory, and the trend has been echoed in educational publications which have devoted whole issues to communication problems (40, 54). Even the Atlantic Monthly (1) recently included a section on mass communications.