Brian MacWhinney
Encyclopedia
Brian James MacWhinney 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. MacWhinney is best known for his competition model of language acquisition and for creating the CHILDES
(Child Language Data Exchange System) and TalkBank
corpora
. 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
; 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.
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.
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
.
MacWhinney is married and has two sons. He is fluent in seven languages, including English
, Hungarian
, German
, French
, Latin
, Spanish
, and Cantonese, and has presented his research in many countries around the world.
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
.
and TalkBank
corpora
, two widely-used databases for language acquisition
research.
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
, second language learners
, adult conversation
, 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
(NIH-NICHD) and the National Science Foundation
Linguistics Program.
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.
Professor
A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...
of Psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
. He specializes in first
Language acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocal as with...
and second language acquisition
Second language acquisition
Second-language acquisition or second-language learning is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the name of the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process...
, psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
, and the neurological bases of language
Neurolinguistics
Neurolinguistics is the study of the neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methodology and theory from fields such as neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive science,...
, 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 of language acquisition and for creating the CHILDES
Childes
Childes may refer to:*Childe's Tomb , Dartmoor, England*CHILDES, or Child Language Data Exchange System, a database of child language...
(Child Language Data Exchange System) and TalkBank
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...
corpora
Speech corpus
A speech corpus is a database of speech audio files and text transcriptions.In Speech technology, speech corpora are used, among other things, to create acoustic models ....
. He has also helped to develop a stream of pioneering software programs for creating and running psychological experiments, including PsyScope
PsyScope
PsyScope is a graphical user interface 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...
, an experimental control system for the Macintosh
Macintosh
The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...
; E-Prime, an experimental control system for the Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
platform; and System for Teaching Experimental Psychology
System for Teaching Experimental Psychology
System for Teaching Experimental Psychology 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...
(STEP), a database of scripts
Scripting language
A scripting language, script language, or extension language is a programming language that allows control of one or more applications. "Scripts" are distinct from the core code of the application, as they are usually written in a different language and are often created or at least modified by the...
for facilitating and improving psychological and linguistic research.
Biography
MacWhinney earned a B.A.Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
in rhetoric
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
and geology
Geology
Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...
from the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
in 1965, at the age of 19. He subsequently received an M.A.
Master of Arts (postgraduate)
A Master of Arts from the Latin Magister Artium, is a type of Master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The M.A. is usually contrasted with the M.S. or M.Sc. degrees...
in speech science
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:...
(1967) and a Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
in psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
(1974), both also from UC Berkeley. Prior to pursuing a full-time career as a scholar, MacWhinney worked as an elementary school teacher
Teacher
A teacher or schoolteacher is a person who provides education for pupils and students . The role of teacher is often formal and ongoing, carried out at a school or other place of formal education. In many countries, a person who wishes to become a teacher must first obtain specified professional...
in the Oakland Unified School District
Oakland Unified School District
Oakland Unified School District is a public education school district which operates elementary schools , middle schools , and high schools in Oakland, California.-History:...
from 1966–1968, a teaching associate
Teaching fellow
A teaching fellow is a particular teaching role at some universities.-United States:In the USA a teaching fellow is an advanced graduate student who serves as the primary instructor for an undergraduate course...
at UC Berkeley from 1968–1973, a research associate
Research associate
The title of research associate is used to denote an academic research position at a university or similar institution. A research associate usually conducts research under the supervision of a principal investigator. In contrast to a research assistant or research officer, 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
University of Denver
The University of Denver is currently ranked 82nd among all public and private "National Universities" by U.S. News & World Report in the 2012 rankings....
. In 1981, he was invited to join the faculty of the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
, where he has remained since. In 2001, MacWhinney served as a Visiting Distinguished Professor
Distinguished Visiting Professor
Distinguished Visiting Professor is an academic title bestowed by American universities on prominent scholars who have been invited to teach a course in their area of expertise for one semester or more to enrolled undergraduate and graduate students....
at Hong Kong University.
Many organizations and academic institutions, including the International Association for the Study of Child Language
International Association for the Study of Child Language
The International Association for the Study of Child Language is an academic society for first language acquisition researchers. It was founded in 1970 by a group of prominent language acquisition researchers to promote international and interdisciplinary cooperation in the study of child language...
, National Research Council
United States National Research Council
The National Research Council of the USA is the working arm of the United States National Academies, carrying out most of the studies done in their names.The National Academies include:* National Academy of Sciences...
, 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
Federal assistance in the United States
In the United States, federal assistance, also known as federal aid, federal benefits, or federal funds, is defined as any federal program, project, service, and activity provided by the federal government that directly assists or benefits the American public in the areas of education, health,...
, and he has also served as a university program reviewer and as an ad hoc reviewer
Peer review
Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...
for several prestigious journals including Science
Science (journal)
Science is the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is one of the world's top scientific journals....
, Nature
Nature (journal)
Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...
, and Psychological Bulletin and Review. He holds membership and fellowship in many prominent professional societies, including the American Educational Research Association
American Educational Research Association
The American Educational Research Association, or AERA, was founded in 1916 as a professional organization representing educational researchers in the United States and around the world....
, American Psychological Society, Association for Computational Linguistics
Association for Computational Linguistics
The Association for Computational Linguistics is the international scientific and professional society for people working on problems involving natural language and computation. An annual meeting is held each summer in locations where significant computational linguistics research is carried out...
, Cognitive Science Society
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...
, International Association for Child Language, Linguistic Society of America
Linguistic Society of America
The Linguistic Society of America is a professional society for linguists. It was founded in 1924 to advance linguistics, the scientific study of human language. The LSA has over 5,000 individual members and welcomes linguists of all kinds. It works to advance the discipline and to communicate...
, Psychonomic Society
Psychonomic Society
The Psychonomic Society is one of the primary societies for general scientific experimental psychology in the United States. Although open to all areas of experimental psychology, its members typically study areas related to cognitive psychology, such as learning, memory, attention, motivation,...
, and Society for Research in Child Development
Society for Research in Child Development
The Society for Research in Child Development is a professional society for the field of developmental psychology, focusing specifically on child development. It is a multidisciplinary, not-for-profit, professional association with a membership of approximately 5,500 researchers, practitioners,...
.
MacWhinney is married and has two sons. He is fluent in seven languages, including English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, Hungarian
Hungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
, German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, and Cantonese, and has presented his research in many countries around the world.
Competition model
MacWhinney has developed a model of firstLanguage acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocal as with...
and second language acquisition
Second language acquisition
Second-language acquisition or second-language learning is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the name of the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process...
as well as language processing
Language processing
Language processing refers to the way human beings process speech or writing and understand it as language. Most recent theories back the idea that this process is made completely by and inside the brain.- Spoken language :...
called the competition model. This model views language acquisition as an emergentist
Emergentism
In philosophy, emergentism is the belief in emergence, particularly as it involves consciousness and the philosophy of mind, and as it contrasts with reductionism. A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is in some sense more than the "sum" of the properties of the system's parts...
phenomenon that results from competition between lexical items, phonological forms, and syntactic patterns
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
, accounting for language processing on the synchronic
Synchronic
Synchronic may refer to:*Synchronicity*Synchronic analysis, in linguistics * Synchronic, an adjective referring to a quality of music....
, 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
Context (language use)
Context is a notion used in the language sciences in two different ways, namely as* verbal context* social context- Verbal context :...
. The predictions of the competition model have been supported by research in the realms of psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
, cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological substrates underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes. It addresses the questions of how psychological/cognitive functions are produced by the brain...
, and cognitive development
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 brain development and cognitive psychology compared to an adult's point of...
.
CHILDES & TalkBank Projects
MacWhinney developed and directs the CHILDESChildes
Childes may refer to:*Childe's Tomb , Dartmoor, England*CHILDES, or Child Language Data Exchange System, a database of child language...
and TalkBank
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...
corpora
Speech corpus
A speech corpus is a database of speech audio files and text transcriptions.In Speech technology, speech corpora are used, among other things, to create acoustic models ....
, two widely-used databases for language acquisition
Language acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocal as with...
research.
The CHILDES system provides tools for studying conversational interactions
Conversation analysis
Conversation analysis is the study of talk in interaction . CA generally attempts to describe the orderliness, structure and sequential patterns of interaction, whether institutional or in casual conversation.Inspired by ethnomethodology Conversation analysis (commonly abbreviated as CA) is the...
. 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
Aphasia is an impairment of language ability. This class of language disorder ranges from having difficulty remembering words to being completely unable to speak, read, or write....
, second language learners
Second language acquisition
Second-language acquisition or second-language learning is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the name of the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process...
, adult conversation
Conversation
Conversation is a form of interactive, spontaneous communication between two or more people who are following rules of etiquette.Conversation analysis is a branch of sociology which studies the structure and organization of human interaction, with a more specific focus on conversational...
, 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
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development , created by Congress in 1962, supports and conducts research on topics related to the health of children, adults, families, and populations...
(NIH-NICHD) and the National Science Foundation
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
Linguistics Program.
Linguistic Functionalism
Recently, MacWhinney's work has focused on aspects of second language learningSecond language acquisition
Second-language acquisition or second-language learning is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the name of the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process...
and the neural bases of language as revealed by the development of children with focal brain lesions
Aphasia
Aphasia is an impairment of language ability. This class of language disorder ranges from having difficulty remembering words to being completely unable to speak, read, or write....
. He has begun to explore a new form of linguistic functionalism
Functional grammar
Functional theories of grammar include a range of functionally based approaches to linguistics, the scientific study of language. The grammar model developed by Simon Dik bears this qualification in its name, functional grammar, as does Michael Halliday's systemic functional grammar.Role and...
, 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
Grammatical case
In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...
, 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.
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
- CHILDESChildesChildes may refer to:*Childe's Tomb , Dartmoor, England*CHILDES, or Child Language Data Exchange System, a database of child language...
- TalkBankTalkBankTalkBank 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...
- PsyScopePsyScopePsyScope is a graphical user interface 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...
- E-Prime (software)
- System for Teaching Experimental PsychologySystem for Teaching Experimental PsychologySystem for Teaching Experimental Psychology 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...
- International Association for the Study of Child LanguageInternational Association for the Study of Child LanguageThe International Association for the Study of Child Language is an academic society for first language acquisition researchers. It was founded in 1970 by a group of prominent language acquisition researchers to promote international and interdisciplinary cooperation in the study of child language...
External links
- Brian MacWhinney's Homepage
- Faculty Biography, Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University
- Profile, Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition
- Summary of Research Interests
- Child Language Data Exchange System Project (CHILDES)
- TalkBank
- PsyScope--An Experimental Control System for the Macintosh
- System for Teaching Experimental Psychology (STEP)