Michael C. Frank

Michael C. Frank is a developmental psychologist at Stanford University who proposed that infants' language development may be thought of as a process of Bayesian inference.^[1] He has also studied the role of language in numerical cognition by comparing the performance of native Pirahã language speakers to that of MIT undergraduate students in numeric tasks.^[2] For this work, he traveled to Amazonas, Brazil with Daniel Everett, a linguist best known for his claim that Pirahã disproves a crucial component of Noam Chomsky's theory of universal grammar, recursion. Frank won the Cognitive Science Society's prestigious Marr Award for this work in 2008.^[3]

References

1. Frank, M. C., Goodman, N. D., & Tenenbaum, J. (2009). Using speakers’ referential intentions to model early cross-situational word learning 2012-10-23 at the Wayback Machine. Psychological Science, 20, 579-585.
2. Frank, M. C., Everett, D. L., Fedorenko, E., & Gibson, E., (2008). Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition^{[permanent dead link]}. Cognition, 108, 819-824.
3. List of Marr Award winners 2010-12-30 at the Wayback Machine published by the Cognitive Science Society