Miller wrote several books and directed the development of WordNet, an online word-linkage database usable by computer programs.

He authored the paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," in which he observed that many different experimental findings considered together reveal the presence of an average limit of seven for human short-term memory capacity.

Rejecting this approach, Miller devised experimental techniques and mathematical methods to analyze mental processes, focusing particularly on speech and language.

He was also influenced by Professor Donald Ramsdell, who introduced him both to psychology, and, indirectly through a seminar, to his future wife Katherine James.

[4] At Harvard he worked in Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, under the supervision of Stanley Smith Stevens, researching military voice communications for the Army Signal Corps during World War II.

He took a sabbatical in 1950, and spent a year as a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, to pursue his interest in mathematics.

He led the psychology group at the MIT Lincoln Lab and worked on voice communication and human engineering.

In 1958–59, Miller took leave to join the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, California, (now at Stanford University).

[5] At the time of his death, he was survived by his wife Margaret; the children from his first marriage: son Donnally James and daughter Nancy Saunders; two stepsons, David Skutch and Christopher Skutch; and three grandchildren: Gavin Murray-Miller, Morgan Murray-Miller and Nathaniel James Miller.

He and others such Jerome Bruner and Noam Chomsky founded the field of Cognitive Psychology, which accepted the study of mental processes as fundamental to an understanding of complex behavior.

In succeeding years, this cognitive approach largely replaced behaviorism as the framework governing research in psychology.

[1] Miller invented the term chunk to characterize the way that individuals could cope with this limitation on memory, effectively reducing the number of elements by grouping them.

[16] For many years starting from 1986, Miller directed the development of WordNet, a large computer-readable electronic reference usable in applications such as search engines, which was created by a team that included Christiane Fellbaum, among others.

[18] Miller also later worked closely with entrepreneur Jeff Stibel and scientists at Simpli.com Inc., on a meaning-based keyword search engine based on WordNet.

[20] Together with Noam Chomsky he published papers on the mathematical and computational aspects of language and its syntax, two new areas of study.

[21][22][23] Miller also studied the human understanding of words and sentences, a problem also faced by artificial speech-recognition technology.

The book was a scientific study of language, emphasizing quantitative data, and was based on the mathematical model of Claude Shannon's information theory.

[25] It used a probabilistic model imposed on a learning-by-association scheme borrowed from behaviorism, with Miller not yet attached to a pure cognitive perspective.

[26] The first part of the book reviewed information theory, the physiology and acoustics of phonetics, speech recognition and comprehension, and statistical techniques to analyze language.

He was also critical of Miller's use of simple, Skinnerian single-stage stimulus-response learning to explain human language acquisition and use.

This approach, per Osgood, made it impossible to analyze the concept of meaning, and the idea of language consisting of representational signs.

The TOTE strategy, in its initial test phase, compared the input against the image; if there was incongruity the operate function attempted to reduce it.

This cycle would be repeated till the incongruity vanished, and then the exit function would be invoked, passing control to another TOTE unit in a hierarchically arranged scheme.

[27] Peter Milner, in a review in the Canadian Journal of Psychology, noted the book was short on concrete details on implementing the TOTE strategy.

Miller specifically addressed experimental data refuting the behaviorist framework at concept level in the field of language and cognition.

[32] From 1987 the department of psychology at Princeton University has presented the George A. Miller prize annually to the best interdisciplinary senior thesis in cognitive science.