Brian James MacWhinney was born on August 22,1945 and is a Professor of Psychology and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University.
12 Facts About Brian MacWhinney
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Brian MacWhinney 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.
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Brian MacWhinney has 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, a database of scripts for facilitating and improving psychological and linguistic research.
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Brian MacWhinney was hired for his first full-time academic position in 1974 as a tenure-track professor of psychology at the University of Denver.
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In 2001, Brian MacWhinney served as a Visiting Distinguished Professor at Hong Kong University.
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Brian MacWhinney 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.
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Brian MacWhinney is fluent in six languages, including English, Hungarian, German, French, Spanish, and Italian, and has presented his research in many countries around the world.
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Brian MacWhinney has developed a model of first and second language acquisition as well as language processing called the competition model.
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Brian MacWhinney developed and directs the CHILDES and TalkBank corpora, two widely used databases for language acquisition research.
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Brian MacWhinney manages FluencyBank, a TalkBank project, together with Nan Bernstein Ratner.
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Recently, Brian 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.
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Brian MacWhinney 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.