Brian MacWhinney
Director, CHILDES - Child Language Data Exchange System
- BH 254M
- 412-268-3793
Bio
I am a Teresa Heina Professor of Cognitive Psychology whose research spans language acquisition and psycholinguistics. I continue to be a leader in SLA. My most well-known contributions to the field include my work on emergentist theory and the Competition Model of language processing (MacWhinney, 2015). I also manage the NIH and NSF-funded CHILDES and TalkBank (including SLABank) corpora. My mentorship with SLA students is also well documented. My recent work with SLA students includes studies with online tutors for the learning of English article usage, studies of beginners' learning of French noun gender, L2 learning of definite article selection in WikiPedia articles in German, online L2 learning through captioned video, language learning in VR, eye-movement monitoring of predictive processing in L2 Japanese, literacy training in Latin, learning of compounds and verb expansion in Mandarin, online methods for learning Pinyin and Chinese tones, computational tools for corpus analysis, and the development of an online database with commentary for analyzing interactions in the L2 classroom.
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, and 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.