introduces the object and orientation of the text. The author maintains that the object is to summarize for students of psychology the results of scientific studies of language and communication. The orientation is biased in two directions; it is scientific and psychological. These introductory remarks can be summarized as follows: The orientation toward communication assumed in this book is scientific and psychological. Certain basic assumptions about communication can be listed: (1) Scientific psychology is concerned with the analysis of behavior, and the use of mentalistic concepts is a lapse from scientific standards and little more than plausible fiction at best. (2) Verbal symbols differ from other stimuli that guide behavior because their associations with things or events are built up through the intervention of other people. (3) The component elements of the stream of verbalization change significance according to the context in which they occur, and it is essential to consider the patterns they form as well as the elements themselves. (4) All communication systems include, in one form or other, five components: the source of information, the transmitter to encode the information into communicable form, the channel that conveys the coded information through space or time, the receiver to decode the message, and the destination of the information. The various possibilities for errors introduce noise into the system. (5) In order to serve its purpose, communicative behavior is necessarily variable and so must be discussed in statistical terms. These assumptions are elaborated, related, and supported with factual evidence in the following chapters. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)