Brian Macwhinney

Carnegie Mellon University | CMU · Department of Psychology

Dear Professor MacWhinney, many thanks for accepting our invitation for the interview. Edward and Hassan: Let’s begin with some background. Could you please share with us your journey into the field of psycholinguistics? In other words, what sparked your original interest in this area of research in the first place? For example, were there any spec...

Ali Panahi and Hassan Mohebbi systematically reviewed Brian MacWhinney's 55 years of research and publication in language education and psychology. The study was conducted in varying sections. Section 1 illustrates a methodology for the systematic review. It presents an impressionistic framework based on which the reviewers developed some exclusion...

Purpose Communication can be chronically impacted by severe traumatic brain injury (TBI), yet there is a critical lack of research investigating communication recovery beyond 12 months postinjury with discourse measures. This longitudinal study aimed to investigate quantitative and qualitative changes in important event recounts produced by a group...

Audrey Holland's core beliefs of respect for people and the quality of their lives informed her life's work. This examination of the ways she managed the academic, research, and clinical parts of her illustrious career shows how Audrey leaves a rich legacy and serves as a model for navigating an impactful career path and enhancing clinical interact...

Background Findings from language sample analyses can provide efficient and effective indicators of cognitive impairment in older adults. Objective This study used newly automated core lexicon analyses of Cookie Theft picture descriptions to assess differences in typical use across three groups. Methods Participants included adults without diagno...

Purpose This study explored the use of an automated language analysis tool, FLUCALC, for measuring fluency in aphasia. The purpose was to determine whether CLAN's FLUCALC command could produce efficient, objective outcome measures for salient aspects of fluency in aphasia. Method The FLUCALC command was used on CHAT transcripts of Cinderella stori...

We present a novel benchmark dataset and prediction tasks for investigating approaches to assess cognitive function through analysis of connected speech. The dataset consists of speech samples and clinical information for speakers of Mandarin Chinese and English with different levels of cognitive impairment as well as individuals with normal cognit...

The ADReSS-M Signal Processing Grand Challenge was held at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2023. The challenge targeted difficult automatic prediction problems of great societal and medical relevance, namely, the detection of Alzheimer's Dementia (AD) and the estimation of cognitive test sco...

Background To better understand the progressive decline of language abilities in aging and dementia, we expanded the quality and quantity of resources in DementiaBank — an open‐access database of multimedia spoken language interactions for the study of speech and language abilities across the progression of dementia. This work builds from the succe...

Purpose: The goal of the Collaborative Commentary (CC) system is to make the TalkBank adult clinical databases-including AphasiaBank, DementiaBank, RHDBank, and TBIBank-open to commentary and analysis from the full community of researchers, instructors, students, and clinicians. Method: CC allows a group leader to establish a commentary group an...

Purpose A major barrier to the wider use of language sample analysis (LSA) is the fact that transcription is very time intensive. Methods that can reduce the required time and effort could help in promoting the use of LSA for clinical practice and research. Method This article describes an automated pipeline, called Batchalign, that takes raw audi...

Objective: To examine predictive factors underlying communication and psychosocial outcomes at 2-years post-injury. Prognosis of communication and psychosocial outcomes following severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) is largely unknown yet is relevant for clinical service provision, resource allocation and managing patient and family expectations fo...

Purpose: Dementia from Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized primarily by a significant decline in memory abilities; however, language abilities are also commonly affected and may precede the decline of other cognitive abilities. To study the progression of language, there is a need for open-access databases that can be used to build algorithm...

Background We discuss a free software system (Computerized Language Analysis [CLAN]) that can enable fast, thorough, and informative language sample analysis (LSA). Method We describe methods for eliciting, transcribing, analyzing, and interpreting language samples. Using a hypothetical child speaker, we illustrate use KidEval to generate a diagno...

This Signal Processing Grand Challenge (SPGC) targets a difficult automatic prediction problem of societal and medical relevance, namely, the detection of Alzheimer's Dementia (AD). Participants were invited to employ signal processing and machine learning methods to create predictive models based on spontaneous speech data. The Challenge has been...

Traumatic Brain Injury has been established as a priority research area for public health, affecting an estimated 69 million individuals worldwide each year1. Large scale collaborative datasets may help to better understand this heterogenous and chronic health condition. In this paper we present TBIBank; an innovative digital health resource that a...

Background: People with language problems following stroke (aphasia) benefit from speech and language therapy. Optimising speech and language therapy for aphasia recovery is a research priority. Objectives: The objectives were to explore patterns and predictors of language and communication recovery, optimum speech and language therapy intervention...

Purpose The aim of this study was to advance the use of structured, monologic discourse analysis by validating an automated scoring procedure for core lexicon (CoreLex) using transcripts. Method Forty-nine transcripts from persons with aphasia and 48 transcripts from persons with no brain injury were retrieved from the AphasiaBank database. Five s...

This study investigated gesture–speech integration (GSI) among adolescents who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) and those with typical hearing. Thirty-eight adolescents (19 with hearing loss) performed a Stroop-like task in which they watched 120 short video clips of gestures and actions twice at random. Participants were asked to press one button...

Background: Collation of aphasia research data across settings, countries and study designs using big data principles will support analyses across different language modalities, levels of impairment, and therapy interventions in this heterogeneous population. Big data approaches in aphasia research may support vital analyses, which are unachievable...

This chapter examines state-of-the-art methods for coding, analyzing, and interpreting discourse-level language data from children and adults with language disorders using the data, tools, and methods provided by the TalkBank system (https://www.talkbank.org). These open and free methods have been used for language sample analysis (LSA) with severa...

Background and Purpose Optimizing speech and language therapy (SLT) regimens for maximal aphasia recovery is a clinical research priority. We examined associations between SLT intensity (hours/week), dosage (total hours), frequency (days/week), duration (weeks), delivery (face to face, computer supported, individual tailoring, and home practice), c...

Purpose: To advance the use of structured, monologic discourse analysis by demonstrating the reliability and accuracy of an automated scoring procedure for core lexicon.Method: 49 transcripts from persons with aphasia and 48 transcripts from persons not brain injured were retrieved from the AphasiaBank database. Five structured monologic discourse...

Background Right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) can cause challenges with information gathering. Cognitive processes aid in implicit and explicit information gathering, yet the relationship between these processes and question-asking, the most explicit avenue of information gathering, has not been explored. The purpose of this exploratory descriptiv...

In the 1980s, Elizabeth Bates, Csaba Pléh, Brian MacWhinney, and colleagues formulated a functionalist, usage-based approach to language processing and learning they called the Competition Model. The model viewed linguistic forms as competing during production for the expression of meanings and during comprehension for mapping forms onto meanings....

Purpose The Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) is a well-known language sample analysis tool. However, its psychometric properties have not been assessed across a wide sample of typically developing preschool-age children and children with language disorders. We sought to determine the profile of IPSyn scores by age over early childhood. We additio...

Background: Large-shared databases and automated language analyses allow for the application of new data analysis techniques that can shed new light on the connected speech of people with aphasia (PWA). Aims: To identify coherent clusters of PWA based on language output using unsupervised statistical algorithms and to identify features that are mos...

Purpose Analysis of connected speech in the field of adult neurogenic communication disorders is essential for research and clinical purposes, yet time and expertise are often cited as limiting factors. The purpose of this project was to create and evaluate an automated program to score and compute the measures from the Quantitative Production Anal...

Building on the success of the ADReSS Challenge at Interspeech 2020, which attracted the participation of 34 teams from across the world, the ADReSSo Challenge targets three difficult automatic prediction problems of societal and medical relevance, namely: detection of Alzheimer's Dementia, inference of cognitive testing scores, and prediction of c...

Purpose: Right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) commonly causes pragmatic language disorders that are apparent in discourse production. Specific characteristics and approaches to assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of these disorders are not well-defined. RHDBank, a shared database of multimedia interactions for the study of communication using disc...

The ADReSS Challenge at INTERSPEECH 2020 defines a shared task through which different approaches to the automated recognition of Alzheimer's dementia based on spontaneous speech can be compared. ADReSS provides researchers with a benchmark speech dataset which has been acoustically pre-processed and balanced in terms of age and gender, defining tw...

Purpose: Speech and language pathology (SLP) for aphasia is a complex intervention delivered to a heterogeneous population within diverse settings. Simplistic descriptions of participants and interventions in research hinder replication, interpretation of results, guideline and research developments through secondary data analyses. This study aimed...

Purpose The heterogeneous nature of measures, methods, and analyses reported in the aphasia spoken discourse literature precludes comparison of outcomes across studies (e.g., meta-analyses) and inhibits replication. Furthermore, funding and time constraints significantly hinder collecting test–retest data on spoken discourse outcomes. This research...

Purpose Analysis of spontaneous speech samples is important for determining patterns of language production in people with aphasia. To accomplish this, researchers and clinicians can use either hand coding or computer-automated methods. In a comparison of the two methods using the hand-coding NNLA (Northwestern Narrative Language Analysis) and auto...

Purpose: Speech and language pathology (SLP) for aphasia is a complex intervention delivered to a heterogeneous population within diverse settings. Simplistic descriptions of participants and interventions in research hinder replication, interpretation of results, guideline and research developments through secondary data analyses. This study aimed...

Purpose Right-hemisphere brain damage (RHD) can affect pragmatic aspects of communication that may contribute to an impaired ability to gather information. Questions are an explicit means of gathering information. Question types vary in terms of the demands they place on cognitive resources. The purpose of this exploratory descriptive study is to t...

Ambridge argues persuasively for the importance in language learning of a rich database of input exemplars. However, a fuller account must also consider the importance of on-line and developmental competition between rote exemplar-based storage and emergent patterns that can optimize retrieval.

AphasiaBank is a shared, multimedia database for the study of communication in aphasia. This article describes a variety of discourse measurement tools and teaching resources available at the AphasiaBank website. The discourse measurement tools include main concept analysis, core lexicon checklists, correct information unit computation techniques,...

Primary Objective: To investigate the nature and patterns of narrative discourse impairment in people with severe Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) during early recovery. Methods and Procedures: A single image picture description task was administered to 42 participants with severe TBI at 3 and 6-months post-injury. The same task was administered to 37...

Background: Speech and language therapy (SLT) benefits people with aphasia following stroke. Group level summary statistics from randomised controlled trials hinder exploration of highly complex SLT interventions and a clinically relevant heterogeneous population. Creating a database of individual participant data (IPD) for people with aphasia aims...

This volume honours Peter Skehan's landmark contributions to research in Task-Based Language Teaching. It offers state-of-the-art reviews as well as cutting-edge new research studies, all reflective of key theoretical and methodological issues in current research such as the role and nature of task complexity and the distinct dimensions of L2 task...

Purpose This clinical focus article describes the development and use of the Famous People Protocol (FPP), a clinical tool for observing the strategies people with severe aphasia (PWSA) can use to communicate when speech is limited. Its goal is to provide a systematic approach to identifying individually appropriate communication strategies for PWS...

HomeBank (https://homebank.talkbank.org/) is an online database of multi-hour, naturalistic audio recordings of child and family everyday experiences. Corpora in the database include (1) raw audio recordings; (2) corpus metadata including for example social details, standardized test scores, disability reports and status, family data such as number...

Primary objective: To investigate whether the degree of participation by people with severe Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), and the degree of support by their communication partners (CPs) changes in conversation during subacute recovery. Methods and procedures: Seventeen pairs of participants with TBI and their CPs were video-recorded during a 10 min...

Everywhere in Nature, patterns emerge when the combination of parts on a lower level creates more complex structures which are then subject to constraints and competition on this new level. This means that emergentist accounts must focus on a description of levels, competition, and constraints. The four approaches to neuroemergentism analyzed by He...

This article analyzes the instructed learning of the English article system by second language (L2) learners. The Competition Model (MacWhinney, 1987, 2012) was adopted as the theoretical framework for analyzing the cues to article usage and for designing effective computer-based article instruction. Study 1 found that article cues followed a Zipfi...

Ongoing advances in computer technology have opened up a deluge of new datasets for understanding human behavior (Goldstone & Lupyan, 2016). Many of these datasets provide information on the use of written language. However, data on naturally occurring spoken-language conversations are much more difficult to obtain. A major exception to this is the...

Objectives: Although much is known about discourse impairment, little is known about discourse recovery after severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). This paper explores discourse recovery across the critical first year, controlling for pre-injury, injury and post-injury variables. Design and methods: An inception cohort comprising 57 participants...

Purpose: In this letter, the authors respond to Pavelko and Owens' (2017) newly advanced set of procedures for language sample analysis: Sampling Utterances and Grammatical Analysis Revised (SUGAR). Method: The authors contrast some of the new guidelines for transcription, morpheme segmentation, and language sample elicitation in SUGAR with trad...

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between picture naming performance and the ability to communicate the gist, or essential elements, of a story. We also sought to determine if this relationship varied according to Western Aphasia Battery-Revised (WAB-R; Kertesz, 2007) aphasia subtype. Method: Demographic informat...

Background: There is limited research on communicative recovery during the early stages after a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) in adults. Methods and procedures: In the current study 43 people with severe TBI described a simple procedure at 3 and 6 months post injury and this was compared to the description provided by 37 healthy speakers. Lin...

This study investigated the effects of teaching English prepositions using schematic diagrams inspired by cognitive linguistics in a computer-based tutorial system called the English Preposition Tutor. Training was designed based on the theoretical framework of the Competition Model and a cognitive linguistic analysis of prepositions. Sixty-four Ca...

Current inquiry into language processing focuses on predictive capabilities in anticipating words. This study investigates the predictability of separable verb prefixes in German, when they occur in sentence final position, often with much intervening material. Forty-nine speakers of German completed a cloze-task to measure their ability to predict...

In accord with articles 19 and 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, people with speech and language disorders have the right to receive maximal benefit from academic research on speech and language acquisition and disorders. To evaluate the diverse nature of speech and language disorders, this research must have access to large datasets...

The functional approach to language holds that the forms of natural languages are created, governed, constrained, acquired, and used in the service of communicative functions. To evaluate this claim, we need to examine both the strengths and the weaknesses of the functional approach.

The study of morphological errors observed in neurodevelopmental disorders has often been a source of empirical evidence for contrasting accounts of language acquisition (i.e. modular vs. neuroconstructivist). Conflicting findings may be related to the wide range of methodologies adopted, and to the fact that a significant number of studies have fo...

Purpose: This study examined discourse characteristics of individuals with aphasia who scored at or above the 93.8 cutoff on the Aphasia Quotient subtests of the Western Aphasia Battery-Revised (WAB-R; Kertesz, 2007). They were compared with participants without aphasia and those with anomic aphasia. Method: Participants were from the AphasiaBan...

Given the pervasiveness and inevitability of first language acquisition, we often tend to take the process of language learning for granted. But language is the most complex skill that a human being can master. The child's ability to produce the first word is based on three earlier developments. The first is the infant's growing ability to record t...

The study of second language acquisition (SLA) can benefit from the same process of datasharing that has proven effective in areas such as first language acquisition and aphasiology. Researchers can work together to construct a shared platform that combines data from spoken and written corpora, online tutors, and Web-based experimentation. Many of...

Purpose: This study evaluates how proposition density can differentiate between persons with aphasia (PWA) and individuals in a control group, as well as among subtypes of aphasia, on the basis of procedural discourse and personal narratives collected from large samples of participants. Method: Participants were 195 PWA and 168 individuals in a...

Primary objective: To investigate the nature and patterns of conversational topics discussed by individuals with severe TBI and familiar communication partners at 3 and 6 months post-injury, and to examine changes occurring in conversational topics during sub-acute recovery. Research design: Qualitative content analysis was used to explore the n...

Background: This work focuses on the twenty-six individuals who provided data to AphasiaBank on at least two occasions, with initial testing between 6 months and 5.8 years post-onset of aphasia. The data are archival in nature and were collected from the extensive database of aphasic discourse in AphasiaBank. Aims: The aim is to furnish data on...

In this article, we review the advantages of language sample analysis (LSA) and explain how clinicians can make the process of LSA faster, easier, more accurate, and more insightful than LSA done "by hand" by using free, available software programs such as Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN). We demonstrate the utility of CLAN analysis in studyin...

HomeBank is introduced here. It is a public, permanent, extensible, online database of daylong audio recorded in naturalistic environments. HomeBank serves two primary purposes. First, it is a repository for raw audio and associated files: one database requires special permissions, and another redacted database allows unrestricted public access. As...

The Child Language Data Exchange System Project has developed methods for analyzing many aspects of child language development, including grammar, lexicon, discourse, gesture, phonology, and fluency. This article will describe the methods available for each of these six fields, and how they can be used for assessment in the clinical setting. Thieme...

Child language researchers have often assumed that progress in first language learning depends heavily on language exposure. For example, Hart and Risley (1995) compared children in middle class families with children in lower class families. Based on recordings made across several years in the home, they estimated that by the time the children fro...

AphasiaBank has used a standardized protocol to collect narrative, procedural, personal, and descriptive discourse from 290 persons with aphasia, as well as 190 control participants. These data have been transcribed in the Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT) format for analysis by the Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN) programs. H...

Research on processing in English has shown that verb information facilitates predictive processing. Because Japanese verbs occur at the ends of clauses, this information cannot be used to predict the roles of preceding nominals. Kamide, Altmann and Haywood (2003) showed that native Japanese speakers use case markers to predict forthcoming linguist...

Adults often underestimate the size and scope of the social, cognitive, and motoric challenges that children face when learning language. In fact, language learning is the most complex task that any of us will master, and the fact that we all succeed in learning our native language reflects the extent to which language is shaped to conform to the a...

Purpose: The cross-modal picture-word interference task is used to examine contextual effects on spoken-word production. Previous work documents lexical-phonological interference in children with SLI when a related distractor (e.g., bell) occurs prior to a picture-to-be-named (e.g., a bed). Here we examine whether interference also arises with nonw...

In the research literature on aphasia, the average number of participants is 7.5. To go beyond this narrow sampling, the AphasiaBank project has constructed a database of one-hour interactions with 285 PWAs and 180 controls. The protocol includes story retellings, picture descriptions, procedural discourse, list recall and repetition, verb naming,...

Psycholinguistics combines methods and theories from psychology and linguistics. It attempts to evaluate the psychological reality and underpinnings of linguistic rules and processes. It also seeks to link word and sentence processing to the deeper expressive processes of message construction and interpretation. Modern psycholinguistic theories emp...

This book examines the issue of competing motivations in grammar and language use. The term “competing motivations” refers to the conflicting factors that shape the content and form of grammatical rules and which speakers and addressees need to contend with when expressing themselves, or when trying to comprehend messages. For example, there are on...

“The Syndroling Project” (TSP) is attempting to establish linguistic profiles of typical development at the phonological, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic levels from a corpus of 60 typically developing children. Typical development profiles are then compared with the profiles obtained from corpora of three neurodevelopmental syndromes: Down syndrome...

This special issue celebrates the fortieth anniversary of the Journal of Child Language by presenting reflections on the past and future of research on child language acquisition. In the spirit of this celebration, I review informally the major principles we have identified, the ideas we have rejected, and some of the crucial issues remaining to be...

The development of a core set standards for evaluating the outcomes of treatments for aphasia is an important and inevitable step forward. To maximise the success of this effort, the organisers need to formulate methods to (1) reduce complexity by analysing outcome subcomponents, (2) balance psychometric validity with coverage scope, (3) consider a...