Michael C. Frank is a developmental psychologist at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 who proposed that infants' language development

Language development

Language development is a process starting early in human life, when a person begins to acquire language by learning it as it is spoken and by mimicry. Children's language development moves from simple to complex. Infants start without language. Yet by four months of age, babies can read lips and...

 may be thought of as a process of Bayesian inference

Bayesian inference

In statistics, Bayesian inference is a method of statistical inference. It is often used in science and engineering to determine model parameters, make predictions about unknown variables, and to perform model selection...

. He has also studied the role of language in numerical cognition

Numerical cognition

Numerical cognition is a subdiscipline of cognitive science that studies the cognitive, developmental and neural bases of numbers and mathematics. As with many cognitive science endeavors, this is a highly interdisciplinary topic, and includes researchers in cognitive psychology, developmental...

 by comparing the performance of native Pirahã language

Pirahã language

Pirahã is a language spoken by the Pirahã. The Pirahã are an indigenous people of Amazonas, Brazil, living along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon....

 speakers to that of MIT undergraduate students in numeric tasks. For this work, he traveled to Amazonas, Brazil with Daniel Everett

Daniel Everett

Daniel Leonard Everett is a U.S. author and academic best known for his study of the Amazon Basin's Pirahã people and their language....

, a linguist best known for his claim that Pirahã disproves a crucial component of Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...

's theory of universal grammar

Universal grammar

Universal grammar is a theory in linguistics that suggests that there are properties that all possible natural human languages have.Usually credited to Noam Chomsky, the theory suggests that some rules of grammar are hard-wired into the brain, and manifest themselves without being taught...

, recursion. Frank won the 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...

's prestigious Marr Award for this work in 2008.