Brian MacWhinney

Brian James MacWhinney (born August 22, 1945) is a Professor of Psychology and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. He is an internationally-renowned expert on first and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and the neurological bases of language, and has written and edited several books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these subjects 1. MacWhinney is best known for his Competition Model of language acquisition and for creating the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) and TalkBank corpora. MacWhinney has also developed a stream of pioneering software programs for creating and running psychological experiments, including PsyScope, an experimental control system for the Macintosh; E-Prime, an experimental control system for the Microsoft Windows platform; and System for Teaching Experimental Psychology (STEP), a database of scripts for facilitating and improving psychological and linguistic research.2

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Biography

MacWhinney received a B.A. in rhetoric and geology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965, an M.A. in speech science from UC Berkeley in 1967, and a Ph.D. in psycholinguistics from UC Berkeley in 1974. He was employed as a tenure-track professor of psychology at the University of Denver from 1974-1981 before joining the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University, where he has remained since. In 2002, he was a Visiting Distinguished Professor at Hong Kong University.3

Many organizations and academic institutes have honored MacWhinney for his outstanding achievements, including International Association for the Study of Child Language, National Research Council, and Brain Map Advisory Board. MacWhinney actively participates on several boards of linguistics associations, educational institutions, and psychological societies. He is also a member of American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Society, Association for Computational Linguistics, Cognitive Science Society, International Association for Child Language, Linguistic Society of America, Psychonomic Society, and Society for Research in Child Development. MacWhinney's research success has been recognized by many grant agencies, including NSF, NIMH, NICHD, etc., and he has received numerous awards for his academic and research achievement.

MacWhinney is married and has two sons. He is fluent in several languages, including English, Hungarian, French, Latin, Spanish, and Cantonese, and has presented his research in many countries around the world.4

Competition Model

Main article: Competition Model

MacWhinney has developed a model of first and second language acquisition as well as language processing called the Competition Model. This model views language acquisition as a series of competitions between lexical items, phonological forms, and syntactic patterns, and it accounts for language processing on the synchronic, ontogenetic, and phylogenetic time scales. Empirical studies based on the Competition Model have shown that learning of language forms is based on the accurate recording of many exposures to words and patterns in different contexts. Predictions of the competition model have been supported by research in the realms of psycholinguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive development.5

CHILDES & TalkBank Projects

Main article: CHILDES
Main article: TalkBank

MacWhinney actively participated in the development of the CHILDES and TalkBank corpora, two widely-used databases for language acquisition research.6

The CHILDES system provides tools for studying conversational interactions. These tools include a database of transcripts, programs for computer analysis of transcripts, methods for linguistic coding, and systems for linking transcripts to digitized audio and video. The CHILDES database includes a rich variety of computerized transcripts from language learn­ers. Most of these transcripts record spontaneous conversational interactions. There are also transcripts from bilingual children, older school-aged children, adult second-language learners, children with various types of language disabilities, and aphasics who are trying to recover from language loss. The tran­scripts include data on the learning of 26 different languages. 7

TalkBank contains CHILDES as well as additional linguistic data from older children and adults, including people with aphasia, second language learners, adult conversations, and classroom language learning data.8

Support for the construction and maintenance of the databases comes from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NIH-NICHD) and the National Science Foundation Linguistics Program.

Linguistic Functionalism

Recently, MacWhinney's work has focused on aspects of second language learning and the neural bases of language as revealed by the development of children with focal brain lesions. He has begun to explore a new form of linguistic functionalism, which relates the communicative functions postulated by the Competition Model to the process of perspective-taking. This process allows the human mind to construct an ongoing cognitive simulation based on linguistic abstractions grounded on perceptual realities. The perspective-taking approach views the forms of grammar as emerging from repeated acts of perspective-taking and perspective-switching. Grammatical devices such as pronouns, case, voice, and attachment can all be seen as ways of expressing shifts in a basically ego-centered perspective. One major goal in this new line of research is to better understand the brain mechanisms underlying perspective-shifting.9

Honors and Awards

  • President, International Association for the Study of Child Language, 1999-2002
  • National Research Council panel on Early Childhood Education, 1998-1999
  • International Association for Child Language Executive Committee, 1990-1996
  • Brain Map Advisory Board, 1992-1995
  • Fellow, Association for Psychological Science
  • Fellow, American Psychological Association
  • Advisory Board of the MacArthur Infancy Network, 1988-1990
  • Chair, Oversight Committee for the Behavioral Sciences, 1987
  • Nominated as Fellow, Center for Advanced Research, 1987
  • Director, Child Language Data Exchange System, 1984-present
  • Nominated for NATO fellowship, 1980
  • Nominated for Fulbright lectureship, 1979
  • Ford Fellow, 1973
  • IREX Fellow, 1973

See also

References

  1. ^ "Papers by Brian MacWhinney and Colleagues". Retrieved on 18 December 2008.
  2. ^ "Brian MacWhinney's Home Page". Retrieved on 18 December 2008.
  3. ^ "Brian MacWhinney's Vita". Retrieved on 19 December 2008.
  4. ^ "Brian MacWhinney's Vita". Retrieved on 18 December 2008.
  5. ^ "Competition Model Description". Retrieved on 18 December 2008.
  6. ^ "Brian MacWhinney's Home Page". Retrieved on 18 December 2008.
  7. ^ "CHILDES - Child Language Data Exchange System". Retrieved on 18 December 2008.
  8. ^ "TalkBank". Retrieved on 18 December 2008.
  9. ^ "Research Interests". Retrieved on 18 December 2008.

External links

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  • This page was last modified on 26 December 2008, at 02:12.

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