Brian MacWhinney
Director of CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System)
- BH 254M
- 412-268-3793
Bio
Brian MacWhinney is the Teresa Heina professor of cognitive psychology, whose scholarship encompasses language acquisition, psycholinguistics and second language acquisition (SLA). A preeminent figure in the field, Dr. MacWhinney is internationally recognized for his foundational contributions to emergentist theory and for the development of the Competition Model of language processing.
He serves as principal investigator of the NIH- and NSF-funded CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) and TalkBank projects, including SLABank, which provide extensive, publicly accessible corpora and analytical tools that have become central resources for language research worldwide.
Dr. MacWhinney is also widely recognized for his sustained commitment to graduate mentorship and research training in SLA. His recent collaborative work with students encompasses a broad array of empirical investigations, including:
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Online tutoring interventions for English article usage
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Acquisition of French noun gender among beginning learners
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Definite article selection in German Wikipedia texts
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L2 learning through captioned audiovisual input and virtual reality environments
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Eye-movement monitoring of predictive processing in L2 Japanese
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Literacy training in Latin
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Acquisition of compounds and verb expansions in Mandarin
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Online instructional methods for Pinyin and Chinese tone learning
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Development of computational tools for corpus-based analysis
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Creation of an online, annotated database for examining interactional patterns in L2 classrooms.
Through his theoretical innovation, research leadership and mentorship, Dr. MacWhinney continues to shape the study of language acquisition and its applications across diverse learning contexts.
Education
Ph. D., University of California, Berkeley
B.A., University of California, Berkeley
Areas of Interest
- Second Language Acquisition
- Child Language
- Corpora
- Emergentism
- Competition Model
Courses Taught
- Language and Thought
- Crosscultural Psychology
- Analytic Research Methods
Selected Awards and Honors
- Teresa Heinz Professor of Cognitive Psychology, CMU, 2018
- FABBS Honor Award, 2017
- On the list of 30 most influential living Cognitive Psychologists, 2014
- First Recipient of the IASCL Roger Brown Award, 2011
- Honorary Doctorate, University of Southern Denmark, 2010
Selected Community, University & Professional Service
- Faculty Senate, NSF reviewer, chair CLARIN Federation
Selected Publications
MacWhinney, B. (2019). "Neuroemergentism: Levels and constraints." Journal of Neurolinguistics, 49, 232-234.
MacWhinney, B. (2019). "Task-based analysis and the Competition Model." In Z. Wen & M. Ahmadian (Eds.), Researching Second Language Task Performance and Pedagogy: Essays in Honor of Peter Skehan (pp. 305-315). John Benjamins.
MacWhinney, B. (2019). "TalkBank and SLA." In N. Tracy-Ventura & M. Paquot (Eds.), The Handbook of SLA and Corpora. Routledge.
MacWhinney, B. (2018). "Language attrition and the Competition Model." In M. Schmid (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Attrition. Oxford University Press.
MacWhinney, B. (2017). "A unified model of first and second language learning." In M. Hickmann, E. Veneziano, & H. Jisa (Eds.), Sources of variation in first language acquisition: Languages, contexts, and learners (pp. 287-310). John Benjamins.