This article narrates the history of the interdisciplinary field of psycholinguistics from its modern organization in the 1950s to its application and influence in the field of reading instruction. Beginning as a combination of structural linguistics, behaviorist psychology, and information theory, the field was revolutionized by the collaboration of the psychologist George Miller and the linguist Noam Chomsky. This transformation was, at root, the adoption of the view that humans should be best understood as creative users of language and the rejection of behaviorist or machine models. Under their influence the field came to treat humans as creative, nonmechanical learners and users of language who, like scientists, hypothesize in order to understand and even perceive the world. This vision of language as a nondeterministic process shaped the field of reading instruction by providing the central model to advocates of the whole‐language pedagogical method.