James J. Jenkins

James J. Jenkins (July 29, 1923 – November 17, 2012 ) was an American psychologist who played a significant role in the development of cognitive psychology.

Biography Trained as an industrial psychologist, his early career was shaped by his Fellowship at the Social Science Research Council’s 1953 summer meeting that established the discipline of psycholinguistics. He initially attempted to apply a modified version of behaviorism to the problems of language behavior, and while his “mediational” approach was very influential, he became convinced that it could not provide an adequate account of the structural nature of language as articulated by Noam Chomsky. He continued research on language and cognition, eventually focusing on topics concerning speech perception (in collaboration with his wife, Winifred Strange). His research was marked by an interest in new and even radical ideas (e.g., those advocated by James J. Gibson), a keen appreciation of the value of studying real-world problems (as in his early research on aphasia ), and a willingness to give up cherished theories when the facts drove him to do so. "If you're not making any progress toward understanding the problem," he said, "you've got to change." and through his career served as advisor or co-advisor of 82 PhD's. He is beloved by his students, whom he encouraged to follow their own diverse interests. His students made many important contributions to psychological research (as just one example, the influential work on abstraction in memory done by his students John Bransford and Jeffrey Franks ).

Academic career Jenkins enlisted in the Army in 1942 and was trained as a meteorologist, receiving a B.S. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1944. After serving as a weatherman in the Army Air Forces in the U.S and the South Pacific, he returned to William Jewell College to earn an A.B. in psychology in 1947. He then earned a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Minnesota in 1950, studying industrial psychology under Donald G. Paterson (who trained even more Ph.D.’s in his career than Jenkins did

Selected publications (From over 200 books, chapters, journal articles, and technical reports; see footnote 8 for a complete bibliography).

Schuell, H., & Jenkins, J. J. (1959). The nature of language deficit in aphasia. Psychological Review, 66, 45–67. Jenkins, J. J. (1963). Mediated associations: Paradigms and situations. In C. N. Cofer and B. S. Musgrave (Eds), Verbal behavior and learning. New York: McGraw-Hill. pp. 210–245. Greenberg, J. H., & Jenkins, J. J. (1964). Studies in the psychological correlates of the sound system of American English: I. Measuring linguistic distance from English. II. Distinctive features and psychological space. Word, 20, 156–177. Jenkins, J. J. (1964). A mediational account of grammatical phenomena. Journal of Communication, 14, 86–97. Jenkins, J. J., & Palermo, D. S. (1964). Mediation processes and the acquisition of linguistic structure. In U. Bellugi and R. W. Brown (Eds), The acquisition of language. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Serial No. 92, 29, No. 1, 141–169. Palermo, D. S., & Jenkins, J. J. (1964). Word association norms: Fourth grade through college. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Schuell, H., Jenkins, J. J., & Jimenez-Pabon, E. (1964). The problem of aphasia in adults: Diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. New York: Hoeber. Fodor, J. A., Jenkins, J. J., & Saporta, S. (1967). Psycholinguistics and communication theory. In F. E. X. Dance (Ed.), Human Communication Theory. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, pp. 160–201. (Precis of a never-published book.) Jenkins, J. J., Foss, D. J., & Greenberg, J. H. (1968). Phonological features as cues in learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 77, 200–205. Dember, W. N., & Jenkins, J. J. (1970). General Psychology: Modeling behavior and experience. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Halwes, T., & Jenkins, J. J. (1971). The problem of serial order in behavior is not resolved by context-sensitive associative memory models. Psychological Review, 78, 122–129. Hyde, T. S., & Jenkins, J. J. (1973). Recall for words as a function of semantic, graphic, and syntactic orienting tasks. Journal of verbal Learning and verbal Behavior, 12, 471–480. Jenkins, J. J. (1974). Remember that old theory of memory? Well, forget it! American Psychologist, 29, 785–795. Miyawaki, K. M., Strange, W., Verbrugge, R.R., Liberman, A. M, Jenkins, J. J., & Fujimura, O. (1975). An effect of linguistic experience: The discrimination of and by native speakers of Japanese and English. Perception & Psychophysics, 18, 331–340. Kraft, R. N., & Jenkins, J. J. (1977). Memory for lateral orientation of slides in picture stories. Memory & Cognition, 5(4), 397–403. Jenkins, J.J. (1979). Four points to remember: A tetrahedral model of memory experiments. In L.S. Cermak and F.I.M. Craik (Eds.) Levels of processing in human memory. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum Associates, pp. 429–446. Strange, W., Jenkins, J. J., & Johnson, T. L. (1983). Dynamic specification of coarticulated vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 74, 695–705. Jenkins, J.J. (1985). Acoustic information for objects, places and events. In W.H. Warren & R.E. Shaw (Eds.) Persistence and change. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. 115–138. Jenkins, J. J., (1986). Beyond methodolatry. In B. Baars (Ed.), The cognitive revolution in psychology. New York: The Guilford Press, 237–252. Jenkins, J.J. (1991). Teaching psychology in large classes: Research and personal experience. Teaching of Psychology, 18, 74–80. Jenkins, J. J., Strange, W., & Miranda, S. (1994). Vowel identification in mixed-speaker silent-center syllables. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 95, 1030–1043. Jenkins, J. J. & Tuten, J. T. (1998). On possible parallels between perceiving and remembering events. In R. R. Hoffman, M. F. Sherrick, & J. S. Warm (Eds.) Viewing psychology as a whole: The integrative science of William N. Dember, Washington, DC: APA Books. pp. 291–314. Jenkins, J. J., & Strange, W. (1999). Perception of dynamic information for vowels in syllable onsets and offsets. Perception & Psychophysics, 61, 1200–1210.