Brian James MacWhinney (born August 22, 1945) is a
Professor
Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...
of
Psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...
and
Modern Languages
A modern language is any human language that is currently in use. The term is used in language education to distinguish between languages which are used for day-to-day communication (such as French and German) and dead classical languages such ...
at
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
. He specializes in
first
First or 1st is the ordinal form of the number one (#1).
First or 1st may also refer to:
*World record, specifically the first instance of a particular achievement
Arts and media Music
* 1$T, American rapper, singer-songwriter, DJ, and rec ...
and
second language acquisition
Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning — otherwise referred to as L2 (language 2) acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific dis ...
,
psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind ...
, and the
neurological bases of language, and he has written and edited several books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these subjects. MacWhinney is best known for his
competition model
The Competition Model is a psycholinguistic theory of language acquisition and sentence processing, developed by Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney (1982). The claim in MacWhinney, Bates, and Kliegl (1984) is that "the forms of natural languag ...
of language acquisition and for creating the
CHILDES The Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) is a corpus established in 1984 by Brian MacWhinney and Catherine Snow to serve as a central repository for data of first language acquisition. Its earliest transcripts date from the 1960s, and it ...
(Child Language Data Exchange System) and
TalkBank TalkBank is a multilingual corpus established in 2002 and currently directed and maintained by Brian MacWhinney. The goal of TalkBank is to foster fundamental research in the study of human and animal communication. It contains sample databases fro ...
corpora
Corpus is Latin for "body". It may refer to:
Linguistics
* Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts
* Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files
* Corpus linguistics, a branch of linguistics
Music
* ...
. He has also helped to develop a stream of pioneering
software programs for creating and running
psychological experiments, including
PsyScope
PsyScope is a graphical user interface (GUI) software program that allows researchers to design and run psychological experiments. It runs on Apple Macintosh computers and was originally designed for use with the Mac OS 9 platform. PsyScope was or ...
, an experimental control system for the
Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...
;
E-Prime
E-Prime (short for English-Prime or English Prime, sometimes denoted É or E′) denotes a restricted form of English in which authors avoid all forms of the verb ''to be''.
E-Prime excludes forms such as ''be'', ''being'', ''been'', present ...
, an experimental control system for the
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
platform; and
System for Teaching Experimental Psychology (STEP), a database of
scripts
Script may refer to:
Writing systems
* Script, a distinctive writing system, based on a repertoire of specific elements or symbols, or that repertoire
* Script (styles of handwriting)
** Script typeface, a typeface with characteristics of handw ...
for facilitating and improving psychological and linguistic research.
Biography
MacWhinney earned a
B.A.
Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four yea ...
in
rhetoric
Rhetoric () is the art of persuasion, which along with grammar and logic (or dialectic), is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. Rhetoric aims to study the techniques writers or speakers utilize to inform, persuade, or motivate parti ...
and
geology
Geology () is a branch of natural science concerned with Earth and other astronomical objects, the features or rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which they change over time. Modern geology significantly overlaps all other Ear ...
from the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
in 1965, at the age of 19. He subsequently received an
M.A.
A Master of Arts ( la, Magister Artium or ''Artium Magister''; abbreviated MA, M.A., AM, or A.M.) is the holder of a master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is usually contrasted with that of Master of Science. Tho ...
in
speech science
Speech science refers to the study of production, transmission and perception of speech. Speech science involves anatomy, in particular the anatomy of the oro-facial region and neuroanatomy, physiology, and acoustics.
Speech production
The pro ...
(1967) and a
Ph.D.
A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...
in
psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind ...
(1974), both also from UC Berkeley. Prior to pursuing a full-time career as a
scholar
A scholar is a person who pursues academic and intellectual activities, particularly academics who apply their intellectualism into expertise in an area of study. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or researche ...
, MacWhinney worked as an elementary school
teacher
A teacher, also called a schoolteacher or formally an educator, is a person who helps students to acquire knowledge, competence, or virtue, via the practice of teaching.
''Informally'' the role of teacher may be taken on by anyone (e.g. whe ...
in the
Oakland Unified School District
Oakland Unified School District is a public education school district that operates a total of 80 elementary schools (TK–5), middle schools (6–8), and high schools (9–12). There are also 28 district-authorized charter schools in Oaklan ...
from 1966–1968, a
teaching associate
A teaching fellow (sometimes referred to as a TF) is an individual at a higher education institution, including universities, whose role involves teaching and potentially pedagogic research. The work done by teaching fellows can vary enormously fr ...
at UC Berkeley from 1968–1973, a
research associate
Research associates are researchers (scholars and professionals) that usually have an advanced degree beyond a Master's degree.
In some universities/research institutes, such as Harvard/Harvard Medical School/Harvard School of Public Health, the ...
at UC Berkeley from 1972–1973, and a research psychologist at
UC Davis
The University of California, Davis (UC Davis, UCD, or Davis) is a public land-grant research university near Davis, California. Named a Public Ivy, it is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The institut ...
from 1973-1974. MacWhinney was hired for his first full-time academic position in 1974 as a tenure-track professor of psychology at the
University of Denver
The University of Denver (DU) is a private university, private research university in Denver, Colorado. Founded in 1864, it is the oldest independent private university in the Mountain States, Rocky Mountain Region of the United States. It is ...
. In 1981, he was invited to join the faculty of the Department of Psychology at
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
, where he has remained since. In 2001, MacWhinney served as a
Visiting Distinguished Professor at
Hong Kong University
The University of Hong Kong (HKU) (Chinese: 香港大學) is a public research university in Hong Kong. Founded in 1887 as the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, it is the oldest tertiary institution in Hong Kong. HKU was also the fir ...
.
Many organizations and academic institutions, including the
International Association for the Study of Child Language
The International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL) is an academic society for first language acquisition researchers.
IASCL was founded in 1970 by a group of prominent language acquisition researchers to promote international a ...
,
National Research Council National Research Council may refer to:
* National Research Council (Canada), sponsoring research and development
* National Research Council (Italy), scientific and technological research, Rome
* National Research Council (United States), part of ...
, and Brain Map Advisory Board, have honored MacWhinney for the quality of his research and scholarship. MacWhinney's professional service activities include active participation on the governing boards of several
professional associations
A professional association (also called a professional body, professional organization, or professional society) usually seeks to further a particular profession, the interests of individuals and organisations engaged in that profession, and th ...
,
academic journals
An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and d ...
, and
grant agencies, and he has also served as a university program reviewer and as an
ad hoc reviewer for several prestigious journals including ''
Science
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...
'', ''
Nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...
'', and ''Psychological Bulletin and Review''. He holds membership and fellowship in many prominent professional societies, including the
American Educational Research Association
The American Educational Research Association (AERA, pronounced "A-E-R-A") is a professional organization representing education researchers in the United States and around the world. AERA's mission is to advance knowledge about education and p ...
,
American Psychological Society
The Association for Psychological Science (APS), previously the American Psychological Society, is an international non-profit organization whose mission is to promote, protect, and advance the interests of scientifically oriented psychology in ...
,
Association for Computational Linguistics
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language proces ...
,
Cognitive Science Society
The Cognitive Science Society is a professional society for the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. It brings together researchers from many fields who hold the common goal of understanding the nature of the human mind. The society prom ...
,
International Association for Child Language,
Linguistic Society of America
The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...
,
Psychonomic Society
The Psychonomic Society is an international scientific society of over 4,500 scientists in the field of experimental psychology. The mission of the Psychonomic Society is to foster the science of cognition through the advancement and communicati ...
, and
Society for Research in Child Development
The Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) is a professional society for the field of human development, focusing specifically on child development. It is a multidisciplinary, not-for-profit, professional association with a membership of ...
.
MacWhinney is married and has two sons. He is fluent in six languages, including English,
Hungarian,
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
** Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
, French, Spanish, and
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance language
*** Regional Ita ...
, and has presented his research in many countries around the world.
Competition model
MacWhinney has developed a model of
first
First or 1st is the ordinal form of the number one (#1).
First or 1st may also refer to:
*World record, specifically the first instance of a particular achievement
Arts and media Music
* 1$T, American rapper, singer-songwriter, DJ, and rec ...
and
second language acquisition
Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning — otherwise referred to as L2 (language 2) acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific dis ...
as well as
language processing
Language processing refers to the way humans use words to communicate ideas and feelings, and how such communications are processed and understood. Language processing is considered to be a uniquely human ability that is not produced with the sa ...
called the
competition model
The Competition Model is a psycholinguistic theory of language acquisition and sentence processing, developed by Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney (1982). The claim in MacWhinney, Bates, and Kliegl (1984) is that "the forms of natural languag ...
. This model views language acquisition as an
emergentist phenomenon that results from competition between
lexical items,
phonological forms, and
syntactic patterns, accounting for language processing on the
synchronic
Synchronic may refer to:
* ''Synchronic'' (film), a 2019 American science fiction film starring Jamie Dornan and Anthony Mackie
* Synchronic analysis, the analysis of a language at a specific point of time
*Synchronicity
Synchronicity (german: ...
,
ontogenetic
Ontogeny (also ontogenesis) is the origination and development of an organism (both physical and psychological, e.g., moral development), usually from the time of fertilization of the egg to adult. The term can also be used to refer to the st ...
, and
phylogenetic
In biology, phylogenetics (; from Greek φυλή/ φῦλον [] "tribe, clan, race", and wikt:γενετικός, γενετικός [] "origin, source, birth") is the study of the evolutionary history and relationships among or within groups o ...
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
''Contexts'': ''Understanding People in their Social Worlds'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal and an official publication of the American Sociological Association. It is designed to be a more accessible source of sociological ideas ...
. The predictions of the competition model have been supported by research in the realms of
psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind ...
,
cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental proces ...
, and
cognitive development
Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning, and other aspects of the developed adult bra ...
.
CHILDES & TalkBank Projects
MacWhinney developed and directs the
CHILDES The Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) is a corpus established in 1984 by Brian MacWhinney and Catherine Snow to serve as a central repository for data of first language acquisition. Its earliest transcripts date from the 1960s, and it ...
and
TalkBank TalkBank is a multilingual corpus established in 2002 and currently directed and maintained by Brian MacWhinney. The goal of TalkBank is to foster fundamental research in the study of human and animal communication. It contains sample databases fro ...
corpora
Corpus is Latin for "body". It may refer to:
Linguistics
* Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts
* Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files
* Corpus linguistics, a branch of linguistics
Music
* ...
, two widely used databases for
language acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to ...
research. He manages FluencyBank, a TalkBank project, together with
Nan Bernstein Ratner.
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.
TalkBank contains CHILDES as well as additional linguistic data from older children and adults, including people with
aphasia
Aphasia is an inability to comprehend or formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions. The major causes are stroke and head trauma; prevalence is hard to determine but aphasia due to stroke is estimated to be 0.1–0.4% in th ...
,
second language learners, adult
conversation
Conversation is interactive communication between two or more people. The development of conversational skills and etiquette is an important part of socialization. The development of conversational skills in a new language is a frequent focus ...
, and classroom language learning data.
Support for the construction and maintenance of the databases comes from the
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
The ''Eunice Kennedy Shriver'' National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) is one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States Department of Health and Human Services. It supports and conducts research aime ...
(NIH-NICHD) and the
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...
Linguistics Program.
Linguistic Functionalism
Recently, MacWhinney's work has focused on aspects of
second language learning
Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning — otherwise referred to as L2 (language 2) acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific dis ...
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
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the part of speech, parts o ...
,
case,
voice
The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound production in ...
, 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.
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
*
Competition model
The Competition Model is a psycholinguistic theory of language acquisition and sentence processing, developed by Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney (1982). The claim in MacWhinney, Bates, and Kliegl (1984) is that "the forms of natural languag ...
*
CHILDES The Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) is a corpus established in 1984 by Brian MacWhinney and Catherine Snow to serve as a central repository for data of first language acquisition. Its earliest transcripts date from the 1960s, and it ...
*
TalkBank TalkBank is a multilingual corpus established in 2002 and currently directed and maintained by Brian MacWhinney. The goal of TalkBank is to foster fundamental research in the study of human and animal communication. It contains sample databases fro ...
*
PsyScope
PsyScope is a graphical user interface (GUI) software program that allows researchers to design and run psychological experiments. It runs on Apple Macintosh computers and was originally designed for use with the Mac OS 9 platform. PsyScope was or ...
*
System for Teaching Experimental Psychology
*
International Association for the Study of Child Language
The International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL) is an academic society for first language acquisition researchers.
IASCL was founded in 1970 by a group of prominent language acquisition researchers to promote international a ...
References
External links
Brian MacWhinney's Homepage*
ttps://web.archive.org/web/20090614015730/http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/faculty/macwhinney.shtml Profile, Center for the Neural Basis of Cognitionbr>
Summary of Research InterestsChild Language Data Exchange System Project (CHILDES)TalkBankPsyScope--An Experimental Control System for the MacintoshSystem for Teaching Experimental Psychology (STEP)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Macwhinney, Brian
Living people
1945 births
Applied linguists
Linguists from the United States
American cognitive neuroscientists
Developmental psycholinguists
University of California, Berkeley alumni
University of Denver faculty
Carnegie Mellon University faculty
Scientists from Pittsburgh
Bilingualism and second-language acquisition researchers