When Brian MacWhinney hears voices in his head, it’s not a bad thing. The psychiatry professor is an expert in children’s language development and has listened to countless transcripts over the course of his 40-plus-year career in linguistic study. MacWhinney has also helped develop several major tools to improve psychological and linguistic research, including the Child Language Data Exchange System and TalkBank databases, international databases that provide the major source of data on spoken language. MacWhinney was honored for those contributions with the inaugural Roger Brown Award from the International Association for the Study of Child Language.
—Elizabeth May
