Brian MacWhinney

Email: macw@cmu(dot)edu

Dr. Brian MacWhinney is Teresa Heinz Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. He received a Ph.D. in psycholinguistics in 1974 from the University of California at Berkeley.

Together with Elizabeth Bates, Dr. MacWhinney has developed a computational model of the acquisition of grammar and a functionalist account of the development of sentence processing called the Competition Model. The current version of that model, which emphasizes relations between first and second language learning, is called the Unified Competition Model. This newer formulation uses emergentist theory to view features of language structure and acquisition as arising from competing motivations driven by processes and constraints across divergent timescales. This program is developed in the 2015 Handbook of Language Emergence (Brian MacWhinney and William O'Grady, editors) and the 2014 Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage (Brian MacWhinney, Andrej Malchukov and Edith Moravcsik, editors). 

In 1984, he and Catherine Snow co-founded the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) Project for the computational study of child language transcript data at https://childes.talkbank.org. CHILDES is now a major component of the larger TalkBank system which covers 13 other language areas including aphasia, L2 learning, dementia, stuttering and others. There are now well over 8000 published articles based on the use of TalkBank data and programs.