THORNDIKE, Edward L(ee) [1874–1949]. American psychologist and lexicographer, born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, and educated at Wesleyan U., Connecticut, and Harvard. He won a fellowship to Columbia, where he studied with the psychologist James McKeen Cattell and the anthropologist Franz Boas, from whom he acquired a lifelong interest in the quantitative treatment of psychological data. Thorndike's research on stimulus-response and transfer of learning had a major impact on English-language instruction in US schools for both native and second-language speakers. He suggested that conditioned responses account, in part, for word meaning in everyday life and maintained that words which occur frequently in contiguity come to be associated with each other and function as a class. The meaning of a word could therefore be described as a ‘habit bond’. To demonstrate his contention that the frequency of a word's usage was related to the recognition of its meaning on the part of the learner, Thorndike prepared with Irving Lorge several lists of the most commonly used English words (published as
The Teacher's Word Book series, 1921, 1931, 1944) which were used by editors of elementary school readers and ESL texts to select vocabulary for their publications. Applying the results of his research on language and learning, Thorndike influenced the design, order, and writing style of
The Thorndike Junior Dictionary (1935) and
The Thorndike Senior Dictionary (1941), on which he collaborated with Clarence Barnhart. The definitions and illustrative sentences in these dictionaries emphasized what he held to be the ultimate aims in education: happiness, appreciation of beauty, utility, and service. Although many of his opinions were controversial, his influence was widespread. He produced more than 500 works, including
Reading Scales (1919),
The Thorndike Test of Word Knowledge (1922), and
Teaching English Suffixes (1941), and served as president of the New York Academy of Sciences and the American Psychological Association.
