Brian James MacWhinney (born August 22, 1945) is a Professor of Psychology and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. He specializes in first and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and the neurological bases of language, and he has written and edited several books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these subjects. MacWhinney is best known for his competition model of language acquisition and for creating the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) and TalkBank corpora. 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; E-Prime, an experimental control system for the Microsoft Windows platform; and System for Teaching Experimental Psychology (STEP), a database of scripts for facilitating and improving psychological and linguistic research. Biography MacWhinney earned a B.A. in rhetoric and geology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965, at the age of 19. He subsequently received an M.A. in speech science (1967) and a Ph.D. in psycholinguistics (1974), both also from UC Berkeley. Prior to pursuing a full-time career as a scholar, MacWhinney worked as an elementary school teacher in the Oakland Unified School District from 1966–1968, a teaching associate at UC Berkeley from 1968–1973, a research associate at UC Berkeley from 1972–1973, and a research psychologist at UC Davis from 1973-1974. MacWhinney was hired for his first full-time academic position in 1974 as a tenure-track professor of psychology at the University of Denver. In 1981, he was invited to join the faculty of the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, where he has remained since. In 2001, MacWhinney served as a Visiting Distinguished Professor at Hong Kong University. Many organizations and academic institutions, including the International Association for the Study of Child Language, National Research Council, and Brain Map Advisory Board, have honored MacWhinney for the quality of his research and scholarship. MacWhinney's professional service activities include active participation on the governing boards of several professional associations, academic journals, and grant agencies, and he has also served as a university program reviewer and as an ad hoc reviewer for several prestigious journals including Science, Nature, and Psychological Bulletin and Review. He holds membership and fellowship in many prominent professional societies, including the American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Society, Association for Computational Linguistics, Cognitive Science Society, International Association for Child Language, Linguistic Society of America, Psychonomic