9:00 – 10:30 AM | CHILDES and PhonBank Resources for Studying Child Language Development

Brian MacWhinney, PhD, is Teresa Heinz Professor of Psychology, Computational Linguistics, and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. His Unified Competition Model analyzes first and second language learning as aspects of a single basic system. He has developed a series of 13 TalkBank open access online databases for the study of language learning, multilingualism, and language disorders. The databases for language disorders include AphasiaBank, ASDBank, DementiaBank, FluencyBank, RHDBank, and TBIBank. These databases provide transcriptions of spoken language linked to audio and video media, along with programs for analysis and linguistic profiling. His other research topics include methods for online learning of second language vocabulary and grammar, neural network modeling of lexical development, fMRI studies of children with focal brain lesions, ERP studies of between-language competition, and the role of embodied perspectival imagery in sentence processing.