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

Esperantist An Esperantist () 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 Esperanto and uses it for ...

Biography

Born in Miles City,

Montana Montana ( ) is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is bordered by Idaho to the west, North Dakota to the east, South Dakota to the southeast, Wyoming to the south, an ...

, Culbert moved to

Tacoma Tacoma ( ) is the county seat of Pierce County, Washington, United States. A port city, it is situated along Washington's Puget Sound, southwest of Seattle, southwest of Bellevue, northeast of the state capital, Olympia, northwest of Mount ...

, Washington with his family in 1923 and lived in Tacoma and

Seattle Seattle ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Washington and in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. With a population of 780,995 in 2024, it is the 18th-most populous city in the United States. The city is the cou ...

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 and informally U-Dub or U Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast of the Uni ...

(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 syste ...

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

Boeing 707 The Boeing 707 is an early American long-range Narrow-body aircraft, narrow-body airliner, the first jetliner developed and produced by Boeing Commercial Airplanes. Developed from the Boeing 367-80 prototype, the initial first flew on Decembe ...

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, or simply Boeing (), is an American multinational corporation that designs, manufactures, and sells airplanes, rotorcraft, rockets, satellites, and missiles worldwide. The company also provides leasing and product support s ...

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