Sidney Spence Culbert (May 14, 1913 – October 28, 2003) was a linguist, psychologist and Esperantist.

Biography

Montana Montana () is a U.S. state, state in the Mountain states, Mountain West List of regions of the United States#Census Bureau-designated regions and divisions, division of the Western United States. It is bordered by Idaho to the west, North ...

, Culbert moved to Tacoma, Washington with his family in 1923 and lived in Tacoma and

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a port, seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the county seat, seat of King County, Washington, King County, Washington (state), Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in bo ...

for most of his life. He extensively researched the number of speakers of various languages throughout the world (by stratified sampling), and contributed to the '' World Almanacs section on "Principal Languages of the World". An Associate Professor of Psychology at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seat ...

(Seattle) for most of his academic career, in addition to his research into the speaking populations of languages he made significant contributions to the study of

perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, ...

, contributions that were influential in the design of cockpit instrument panels in the

Boeing 707 The Boeing 707 is an American, long-range, narrow-body airliner, the first jetliner developed and produced by Boeing Commercial Airplanes. Developed from the Boeing 367-80 prototype first flown in 1954, the initial first flew on December ...

jet aircraft. Prior to receiving his doctorate and accepting a professorial position, Culbert had worked for a number of years as an engineer with the

Boeing The Boeing Company () is an American multinational corporation that designs, manufactures, and sells airplanes, rotorcraft, rockets, satellites, telecommunications equipment, and missiles worldwide. The company also provides leasing and ...

Company. During his tenure at the University of Washington he was actively involved in establishing the university's Linguistics Department, but chose to remain in the Psychology Department because his main linguistic focus, involving issues of perception, was in the field of

psycholinguistics Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind ...

, which was then seen as more a matter of psychology than of language. He died on October 28, 2003.

Sources

Research and Methods for Esperanto speakers
{{DEFAULTSORT:Culbert, Sidney S. 1913 births 2003 deaths 20th-century American psychologists University of Washington faculty American Esperantists