Brian MacWhinney

Last updated
Brian MacWhinney
Born (1945-08-22) August 22, 1945 (age 77)
New York, New York, United States
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater University of California, Berkeley
Known for Competition model
CHILDES database
Connectionist modeling
Scientific career
Fields Language acquisition
Psychology
Linguistics
Institutions Carnegie Mellon University
University of Denver
Doctoral advisor Susan Ervin-Tripp
Dan Slobin

Brian James MacWhinney (born August 22, 1945) is a Professor of Psychology and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. He specializes in first and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, 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. [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. [2] He has also helped to develop a stream of pioneering software programs for creating and running psychological experiments, including PsyScope, an experimental control system for the Macintosh; [3] E-Prime, an experimental control system for the Microsoft Windows platform; [4] and System for Teaching Experimental Psychology (STEP), a database of scripts for facilitating and improving psychological and linguistic research. [5]

Contents

Biography

MacWhinney earned a B.A. in rhetoric and geology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965, at the age of 19. He subsequently received an M.A. in speech science (1967) and a Ph.D. in psycholinguistics (1974), both also from UC Berkeley. Prior to pursuing a full-time career as a scholar, MacWhinney worked as an elementary school teacher in the Oakland Unified School District from 1966–1968, a teaching associate at UC Berkeley from 1968–1973, a research associate at UC Berkeley from 1972–1973, and a research psychologist at UC Davis 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. In 1981, he was invited to join the faculty of the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, where he has remained since. In 2001, MacWhinney served as a Visiting Distinguished Professor at Hong Kong University. [6]

Many organizations and academic institutions, including the International Association for the Study of Child Language, National Research Council, 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, academic journals, 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 , Nature , and Psychological Bulletin and Review. He holds membership and fellowship in many prominent professional societies, including the 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. [7]

MacWhinney is married and has two sons. He is fluent in six languages, including English, Hungarian, German, French, Spanish, and Italian, and has presented his research in many countries around the world.

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 an emergentist phenomenon that results from competition between lexical items, phonological forms, and syntactic patterns, accounting 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. The predictions of the competition model have been supported by research in the realms of psycholinguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive development. [8]

CHILDES & TalkBank Projects

MacWhinney developed and directs the CHILDES and TalkBank corpora, two widely used databases for language acquisition research. He manages FluencyBank, a TalkBank project, together with Nan Bernstein Ratner. [9]

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. [10]

TalkBank contains CHILDES as well as additional linguistic data from older children and adults, including people with aphasia, second language learners, adult conversation, and classroom language learning data. [11]

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. [12]

Honors and awards

See also

Related Research Articles

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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 as of 2015 has contents in 26 languages from 230 different corpora, all of which are publicly available worldwide. Recently, CHILDES has been made into a component of the larger corpus TalkBank, which also includes language data from aphasics, second language acquisition, conversation analysis, and classroom language learning. CHILDES is mainly used for analyzing the language of young children and directed to the child speech of adults.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics</span>

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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 from within several subfields of communication, including first language acquisition, second language acquisition, conversation analysis, classroom discourse, and aphasic language. It uses these databases to advance the development of standards and tools for creating, sharing, searching, and commenting upon primary linguistic materials via networked computers.

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 languages are created, governed, constrained, acquired, and used in the service of communicative functions." Furthermore, the model holds that processing is based on an online competition between these communicative functions or motives. The model focuses on competition during sentence processing, crosslinguistic competition in bilingualism, and the role of competition in language acquisition. It is an emergentist theory of language acquisition and processing, serving as an alternative to strict innatist and empiricist theories. According to the Competition Model, patterns in language arise from Darwinian competition and selection on a variety of time/process scales including phylogenetic, ontogenetic, social diffusion, and synchronic scales.

System for Teaching Experimental Psychology (STEP) is a collaborative project designed to maximize the use of E-Prime, PsyScope, and other experiment-generating systems for teaching undergraduate classes in experimental psychology. It is a database of scripts based on classic and student-created psychological experiments, tutorials, utilities, and course frameworks. The project is directed by Brian MacWhinney at Carnegie Mellon University, and other major contributors include Ping Li of the University of Richmond, Chris Schunn of the University of Pittsburgh, and James St. James of Millikin University. Support for STEP comes from the Division of Undergraduate Education of the National Science Foundation.

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The CLAN (Computerized Language ANalysis) program is a cross-platform program designed by Brian MacWhinney and written by Leonid Spektor for the purpose of creating and analyzing transcripts in the Child Language Exchange System (CHILDES) database. CLAN is open source software and can be freely downloaded.

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References

  1. ↑ "Google Scholar search: Peer-Reviewed Papers by Brian MacWhinney" . Retrieved 1 May 2009.
  2. ↑ MacWhinney, Brian (2007). "The TalkBank Project". In Beal, J.; Moisl, K. (eds.). Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora: Synchronic Databases, Vol.1. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave-Macmillan. Archived from the original on 13 June 2007. Retrieved 1 May 2009.
  3. ↑ "PsyScope Manual" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 10 May 2008. Retrieved 1 May 2009.
  4. ↑ "E-Prime" . Retrieved 1 May 2009.
  5. ↑ MacWhinney, Brian; James St. James; Chris Schunn; Ping Li; Walter Schneider (2001). "STEP—A System for Teaching Experimental Psychology using E-Prime". Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers. 33 (2): 287–296. doi: 10.3758/bf03195379 . PMID   11452970.
  6. ↑ "Brian MacWhinney's Vita" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 11 February 2009. Retrieved 19 December 2008.
  7. ↑ "Brian MacWhinney's Vita" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 11 February 2009. Retrieved 18 December 2008.
  8. ↑ MacWhinney, Brian (2005). "A Unified Model of Language Acquisition". In Kroll, Judith; DeGroot, Annette (eds.). Handbook of bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches (PDF). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 June 2010. Retrieved 1 May 2009.
  9. ↑ "FluencyBank". fluency.talkbank.org. Retrieved 2017-02-27.
  10. ↑ MacWhinney, Brian (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk (PDF). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN   978-0-8058-1005-9. Archived from the original (PDF) on 10 July 2015. Retrieved 1 May 2009.
  11. ↑ MacWhinney, Brian (2001). From CHILDES to TalkBank (PDF). Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 June 2010. Retrieved 1 May 2009.
  12. ↑ MacWhinney, Brian (2008). How mental models encode embodied linguistic perspectives (PDF). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 June 2010. Retrieved 1 May 2009.
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