Brian James MacWhinney (born August 22, 1945) is a Professor of Psychology and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University.
[2] He has also helped to develop a stream of pioneering software programs for creating and running psychological experiments, including PsyScope, an experimental control system for the Macintosh;[3] E-Prime, an experimental control system for the Microsoft Windows platform;[4] and System for Teaching Experimental Psychology (STEP), a database of scripts for facilitating and improving psychological and linguistic research.
MacWhinney was hired for his first full-time academic position in 1974 as a tenure-track professor of psychology at the University of Denver.
He is fluent in six languages, including English, Hungarian, German, French, Spanish, and Italian, and has presented his research in many countries around the world.
[8] MacWhinney developed and directs the CHILDES and TalkBank corpora, two widely used databases for language acquisition research.
This process allows the human mind to construct an ongoing cognitive simulation based on linguistic abstractions grounded on perceptual realities.
Grammatical devices such as pronouns, case, voice, and attachment can all be seen as ways of expressing shifts in a basically ego-centered perspective.