Charles E. Osgood

Charles Egerton Osgood (1916 to 1991) was an American psychologist and professor at the University of Illinois, known for his research on semantics, cross-cultural psychology, psycholinguistic theory and peace studies. Born in Somerville, Massachusetts, he switched from journalism to psychology at Dartmouth College after a course with Theodore Karwoski, took his doctorate at Yale in 1945 and was most influenced there by Clark Hull. He introduced the term semantic differential, proposed a mediation theory of meaning and a two-stage mediation account of language learning in 1954, and is credited with helping the early development of psycholinguistics. He taught at Yale and the University of Connecticut before the long Illinois career in which he did most of his work, and held a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 1958 to 1959.