Of course, it turns out that, more often than not, we can give a socially practical reason for behavioral research and it often turns out that when we can't, the reason turns up later. To take one example from my own specialization-you've heard others today-the National Science Foundation can take great pride in having been the first to sponsor studies in the 1960's of what was then seen as the bizarre gesticulating of the deaf in the absence of speech.

What science has discovered there has shocked and intrigued psychologists and linguists for decades since, not to mention the deaf community itself, and that is a grammatical structure, a vocabulary and syntax in the manual and visual mode.

What this has taught us is that language is more powerful than any particular sense and if it's blocked in one sense, it will out through another. It's taught us a respect for the language of the deaf which has given us new insight into the language itself and a fresh perspective on language, and some very exciting developments have occurred in communicating with those who cannot communicate orally. I'm thinking of autistic children, the mentally retarded, and the victims of stroke, as well as the deaf community.

Yet a third reason for supporting research into the nature of the human mind is that practical improvements require most often a solid theoretical base. Developing that theory, that base, may require experiments whose practical payoff is unclear.

A fourth reason: In the inquiry into the nature of the human mind, the United States bears a special responsibility and enjoys special prerogatives for its leadership role. The responsibility is that our European allies in particular follow our lead in these areas, rely on us, read our journals, attend our congresses. Therefore, the worldwide advance in understanding of the human mind is set by the pace of the American scientific community to a large extent, and that in turn is regulated by grants from the National Science Foundation and therefore by the appropriations of the House of Representatives.

The reward that comes from that leadership position is this: Not only can we take pride, not only can our allies see us as a humanitarian and informed nation bringing technology to bear on man's social problems, but also as technology transfer becomes increasingly important economically, these practical developments can affect our own economic position in the world market.

Last, I'd like to mention the very intimate relation that exists, in my view, between the health of our universities and the scope of our federally funded research programs.

I don't believe that the witnesses you have heard so far have been sufficiently forthcoming on the extent to which the universities rely in a vital and day-to-day way on National Science Foundation grants. Without those grants, there would be fewer graduate students who rely on those grants for research assistantships to pay their way. There would be fewer faculty since faculty salaries are paid out of their grants in part, so as to release their time for research. There would, of course, be less knowledge for our students who go on to be the doctors, psychologists, engineers and representatives of the next generation. In light of all this, you may be convinced that research on the human mind should have very high priority. If you ask, then, is it getting that

priority, it's my opinion that it is not. I served on the linguistics panel for 2 years and I saw many worthwhile projects that were not funded for lack of funds.

Moreover, I saw many projects that were nominally funded, but whose budgets were grievously slashed. I acknowledge that the leadership of the Foundation might find my words a bit strong here, but that was the impression that I formed; that is, that there is not only a need for the present level of funding, but, in the opinion of this one laborer in the vineyard, there is a gross shortage of adequate funds for work that should have such high priority.

The result is that many talented young men and women do not even choose a career in research into the human mind because they know it will be difficult to get support for graduate school, because they know there are very few faculty positions for lack of research funds.

In short, we have been paying a high price for the continued underfunding in this area. I believe the question is not, should we be funding research into the human mind, but rather, should we allow ourselves to continue to shortchange it to the extent that we have, given its very high priority?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. BROWN. Thank you. That's a very strong statement, Dr. Lane. Dr. Lane, you make the statement that unfettered science is a measure of the quality of life in an advanced society and I agree with you, although I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "unfettered".

In what modest studies I have made in the history of science, I have never found an era in the history of the human race when science wasn't fettered to some degree. I think what you are talking about is not unfettered science, but federally-supported science.

The question before us is really the priority that we place on channeling tax dollars into basic research and into the various disciplinary fields. We don't set priorities through any magical process around here. We set them in response to political pressure.

How do you create political pressure for elevating the priority for linguistics? How do you go about educating the public as to the importance of the kind of research that you are doing? How do you go about creating, in other words, a scientifically literate public in your particular field, one that can exert a little political pressure?

Dr. LANE. I think that one thing we can do, and I have tried to do it in my own sphere, as Dr. Rodin described in hers, is to carry our findings in the laboratory out into the field of application to which they are naturally related.

In my own work on the American sign language of the deaf, I have tried to bring to the awareness of the deaf community, which, I might say, is a very tight-knit community in the United States, the richness and complexity of their language, the prestige it warrants, and the promise it holds, most important, as a vehicle for their instruction.

I think that there is no question that there is a revolution going on in the American deaf community with regard to their language, a revolution which has sparked similar ones, by the way, in France and Scandanavia. I believe that any sounding of the deaf community would show that they feel very deeply concerned about the support of, for example, sign language research and that an urban representative

would be most ill-advised to take a clear stand against that kind of research.

Now, if we each do that in each of our own spheres, and if the Foundation is aggressive in science information, perhaps we can address the goal that you have cited.

Mr. BROWN. Well, the question is not intended to be quite as stark as it may have sounded. We are basically concerned with the broad problem of creating a scientifically literate public and one that associates the need for, and importance of, scientific research.

This is a part of the mandate of the Foundation, but through an intricate feedback process, which is part of the forces which lead to favorable or unfavorable acceptance of the budgetary request. Hence, we have to be concerned about it. I think the scientific community has to be concerned about it, not for purely selfish reasons, but for the unselfish reason that if scientific unfettered research is as important as you say it is, then it needs to be shared. The sense of its importance and the results of its being done need to be shared.

I probably overemphasize that

I probably overemphasize this, but I am trying to get the idea across in as many ways as I can. You are conveying to us that linguistic research specifically and the broader field within which it is embedded are, if anything, underfunded. May I assume that you have data to substantiate that?

You mentioned that you have been in a position of reviewing grant applications. This area is presumably, then, not funding as large a percentage of good research grants as some of the other areas?

Dr. LANE. I can cite three observations that will help to make this more concrete. First, I observed that there were many worthwhile projects not getting funded. Of course, that's a difficult judgment to make, but the committee that reviews the linguistics program and some of the allied programs, the so-called oversight committee, was asked to look at 10 projects on the margin in each of a number of areas, five of which were in fact funded and five of which were not.

The committee found repeatedly in several areas, including linguistics, that the five that were not funded could very well have been funded and in fact found it very difficult to make that discrimination. That's one indication to me.

A second indication is that the hit rate, to put it in its most crass terms, is extraordinarily low. My understanding is that it's approximately 25 percent.

Now, when you remember that there are thousands upon thousands of people qualified to submit projects in the broadly construed area of linguistics which includes child language development, reading studies, research on foreign and indigenous languages, psycholinguistics, speech and hearing, and so on-and when you recognize that these people never do submit proposals because they know that the likelihood of getting one funded is extraordinarily small, then you realize that there is, indeed, a serious problem caused by underfunding. One can dispute whether, if we funded all the worthwhile projects, the hit rate would be 35, 40, 45, or 50 percent, but it would be a great deal larger than it is now.

The last index I would like to mention, Mr. Chairman, is the level of funding of these budgets. Now, just to speak for myself, I really

pare my NSF budgets to the bone. I do as genuine a job of presenting an economical budget as I can and I believe that many, many investigators do the same. Most, in fact.

Yet, in my own experience, I don't think I have ever had an NSF grant which was funded at more than 60 percent of requested funds, so that my record of approval is partly nominal. It's half as large as it would appear to be because-well, 60 percent-because there are a great many studies I have not carried out that it was my best judgment and that of the reviewers ought to be carried out, simply because there wasn't enough money.

Yes, I would say that we are grossly underfunding inquiry into the human mind, whether it be its linguistic skills or conceptual abilities, its problem solving, and so on.

Mr. BROWN. What do you do when an important research project is funded at 60 percent?

Dr. LANE. I reduce the scope. I send a letter to the program director in which I say the following experiments which were part of the proposal will not be carried out and the following experiments will be curtailed in the following ways.

Mr. BROWN. What is your experience with the amount of time spent by both successful and unsuccessful grant applicants in the preparation of the grants themselves? Has this, in your opinion, become a counterproductive effort?

Is more time being spent in grant application proposals than research?

Dr. LANE. I completely agree with the implication of your statement. It's become ludicrously time-consuming. There is a measure in which the discipline of reviewing the literature, once again, and of stating your argument in its clearest and most forceful terms is a worthwhile exercise.

However, I would say that I spend 30 percent of my productive scholarly time rewriting grant applications.

Mr. BROWN. That's a rather large figure.

Dr. LANE. I have a rather large number of grants. [Laughter.] No. It's a very serious problem. Because the underfunding is so severe, you have no choice. If you have a laboratory you have obligations. I have deaf collaborators. I have hearing collaborators who work with me on this research, staff assistants. I have an obligation to rely not only on NSF, but to turn to every possible quarter to get support.

That multitargeting of the research funding is extremely timeconsuming and expensive all up and down for the Federal agencies and for the principal investigators.

Mr. BROWN. Could you describe a typical research project of the sort that you would seek funding for, not in terms of the content of the research, but in terms of the time involved in research, the number of person years in it, a rough figure as to dollar amounts?

Dr. LANE. Well

Mr. BROWN. I'm not asking for any exactness. Just give me a feel for what we are talking about here.

Dr. LANE. Well, I would say that in this paradigm case, the scope of the proposal depends on the scope of the research program that you want to mount. I would say that the paradigm case would be a psycho

logist or linguist who is requesting something on the order of $30,000 to $40,000 a year to allow him or her to pay subjects, to supplement what the university can provide so as to buy some equipment and some supplies, possibly to travel to one convention to read a paper, some publication costs, and maybe some funds for release time, either during the academic year or the summer.

When you add overhead to that at the rate of 76 or 78 percent of salaries and wages, you very rapidly reach $40,000, $50,000 a year. Mr. BROWN. This is a 1-year, 2-year, multiyear proposal?

Dr. LANE. Typically, my proposals have run 2 or 3 years. Then, they would be written again for an extension or a new direction.

Mr. BROWN. We have speculated about the shape of the future and this has been the subject of a great deal of scholarly writing. The term that's generally used is a postindustrial or information society as rapidly coming upon us.

It seems to me that if we are talking about an information based society, linguistics should have some interest in this emerging revolution in the human condition. Are you accustomed to thinking in terms of research projects involving several disciplines and concerned with a larger framework of problems, in what we might call information theory or something of that sort, so that we have some bearing on the course in which the society is moving?

Dr. LANE. Yes, sir. I would say that that is a characteristic of modern inquiry into the human mind as I have called it, modern cognitive science. The programs that are supported by the-the research programs that are supported by the linguistics program and the memory and cognition program involve a range of disciplinary skills from computer science, psycholinguistics, linguistics, and many others.

I would say that the issue of information coding and decoding and transfer from one system to another is one of the central questions of our discipline. We are very much concerned with the ability of people to receive information and process it from such sources as computers, information channels such as the telephone, person-to-person communication, textual processing.

These are some of the central questions of our field.

Mr. BROWN. Well, we have had many comments about the importance of research in the social sciences, particularly that which seeks a somewhat broader perspective than the narrow disciplinary perspective you might give. I'm not thinking for myself, but I see this in quite a bit of literature that I read.

Of course, if we are going to look at broad societal changes, it becomes more important that we look at this from as broad a viewpoint as possible. I'm wondering about whether the research in your field and the type of research grants encouraged by the foundation could lend any encouragement to this kind of approach, or whether it tends in the opposite direction., the more narrow focus in which there are rich areas for acquiring knowledge, as you have indicated.

Dr. LANE. I must say very honestly, Mr. Brown, that I have been very favorably impressed with the perspicacity and the comprehensiveness of the reviews of the language related proposals that I have seen in the National Science Foundation.

The panel itself is made up of people who are not all linguists, but represent psychologists, language development experts, computer sci