Brian MacWhinney

Brian James MacWhinney is a professor of psychology and modern languages at Carnegie Mellon University whose research centers on how people acquire and process language. Born in 1945, he earned his bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965 and his doctorate in psycholinguistics from the same institution in 1974, before joining the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 1981. With Elizabeth Bates he developed the competition model of language acquisition and processing, which treats fluent language use as the outcome of many cues, such as word order, word meaning, and grammatical markers, competing with and reinforcing one another rather than the product of a single fixed grammar module. MacWhinney is also known for building large-scale research infrastructure for language study: he created CHILDES, the Child Language Data Exchange System, and its successor TalkBank, shared repositories of transcribed child and adult language samples across dozens of languages that let researchers test acquisition theories against real usage data rather than isolated examples. He also contributed to experimental psychology software used to design and run laboratory language studies, work that has made his research tools as influential in the field as his own theoretical model.