Language and Communication

Miller argues that language behavior should be studied functionally as communication, using the mathematical theory of information as an underlying orientation. This approach rejects purely introspective or structural accounts that treat language as a self-contained system divorced from its communicative function. A contemporary reviewer, M. Brewster Smith, described the book's most valuable contribution as the wedding of mathematical information theory and a statisticized association theory into a coherent approach to language behavior . Miller's framework treats speech as a sequence of symbols whose interdependent probabilities constrain the listener's choices, making the study of language empirically tractable through measurable quantities rather than speculative mentalistic constructs.

Miller took the mathematical theory of information developed by communications engineers and used it to reframe psychological problems about language. The book's statistical approach shows how the sequential probabilities linking symbols in speech—the likelihood of one word or phoneme following another—drastically reduce the number of alternatives a listener must consider at any moment. This made the study of language behavior amenable to the same quantitative methods used for other communication channels. Smith noted that succeeding chapters bring out vividly how these interdependent probabilities reduce the alternatives actually open to the listener . The result was a substantial recoding of existing knowledge about language into a framework that promised further research advances.

Recoding is a central mechanism in Miller's framework for understanding how language works as an information-processing system. He proposed that humans handle the constraints of limited channel capacity by recoding information—transforming it from one form into another that is more efficiently processed. This concept, which Miller later developed more fully in his work on chunking and memory, appears in Language and Communication as a general principle for how language users organize and compress the statistical regularities of speech. Smith characterized the book's overall achievement as a "substantial 'recoding' of our information about language and communicative behavior," using the term reflexively to describe the book's own intellectual contribution .

Reviews from the early 1950s were positive about the book's synthetic ambition while acknowledging its preliminary nature. Smith wrote that while the book was not the last word on the psychology of language and communication, it was "an impressive first word" that should fill a major gap as a text and stimulate research in an increasingly active field . Another reviewer in the Journal of Consulting Psychology described the object as summarizing for students of psychology the results of scientific studies of language and communication . These assessments place the book at the founding moment of psycholinguistics as a self-conscious discipline, bridging the more established fields of experimental psychology and linguistics.

Miller's information-theoretic framework stands in direct opposition to Skinner's behaviorist account, which treats language as a system of stimulus-response associations reinforced by environmental contingencies. Where Skinner reduces verbal behavior to the same principles governing any operant behavior, Miller insists on the specifically communicative and statistical structure of language that cannot be captured by reinforcement schedules alone. The book's emphasis on probabilities, recoding, and the reduction of alternatives through sequential dependencies introduces theoretical constructs—like information and channel capacity—that are alien to a strict behaviorist vocabulary. This tension would become explicit in the years following the book's publication, culminating in Chomsky's influential critique of Skinner's Verbal Behavior in 1959.

Language and Communication (1951) is the earlier, more technical and systematic treatment of themes Miller would return to in his 1967 collection The Psychology of Communication: Seven Essays. The earlier book is a textbook-like survey covering phonetics, speech perception, statistical approaches, learning, and social dimensions of language. The later collection, anchored by the famous "Magical Number Seven" essay, is more essayistic and takes the information-processing framework in new directions, particularly regarding memory and cognitive capacity. The earlier work establishes the foundational claim that language is a communication system amenable to information theory; the later work extends that framework to questions of memory, thought, and the limits of human information processing.