Brian MacWhinney

Brian MacWhinney is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. His research investigates language acquisition, cognitive science, and computational approaches to language analysis across diverse populations.

Research focuses on:

• Child language development through the Competition Model
• Cross-linguistic psycholinguistics
• Aphasia and dementia language diagnostics
• Computational tools for language analysis (TalkBank)

Publications emphasize clinical applications of language analysis, particularly for dementia and traumatic brain injury. Recent work develops standardized assessment tools and multilingual corpora through the TalkBank initiative.

Teaches courses in language acquisition, cognitive psychology, and computational linguistics. Leads the development of open-access language databases supporting global research on typical and pathological language.