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

Esperantist An Esperantist ( eo, esperantisto) is a person who speaks, reads or writes Esperanto. According to the Declaration of Boulogne, a document agreed upon at the first World Esperanto Congress in 1905, an Esperantist is someone who speaks Esperant ...

Biography

Born in Miles City,

Montana Montana () is a state in the Mountain West division of the Western United States. It is bordered by Idaho to the west, North Dakota and South Dakota to the east, Wyoming to the south, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columb ...

, Culbert moved to Tacoma,

Washington Washington commonly refers to: * Washington (state), United States * Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States ** A metonym for the federal government of the United States ** Washington metropolitan area, the metropolitan area centered o ...

with his family in 1923 and lived in Tacoma and

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

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 Almanac ''The World Almanac and Book of Facts'' is a US-published reference work, an almanac conveying information about such subjects as world changes, tragedies, and sports feats. It has been published yearly from 1868 to 1875, and again every year sinc ...

s 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 Seattl ...

(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 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 p ...

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, 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