Michael C. Frank

Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology Director, Symbolic Systems Program Stanford University Building 420, Room 278 450 Jane Stanford Way Stanford, CA 94305 +1-650-724-4003 mcfrank at stanford dot edu Office hours Mon 3-4: Sign up here Blog: babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com Twitter: @mcxfrank Selected Talks on Youtube

Links

• The Stanford Language and Cognition Lab, my lab.
• Wordbank, an open repository for data on children's early vocabulary development.
• MetaLab, a platform for visualization and exploration of meta-analyses of developmental data.
• ManyBabies, a collaborative replication project for infancy research.
• childes-db, a flexible and reproducible interface to CHILDES (corpora of child language transcripts).
• Peekbank, a repository for developmental eye-tracking data.

Curriculum Vitae [PDF]

How do we learn to communicate using language? I study children's language learning and how it interacts with their developing understanding of the social world. I am interested in bringing larger datasets to bear on these questions and use a wide variety of methods including team science, online data collection, and computational models. Recent work in my lab has focused on data-oriented approaches to development, including the creation of large datasets like Wordbank and MetaLab. I also have a strong interest in replication, reproducibility, and open science; some of our research addresses these topics. Here is a formal, third-person bio.

Representative Publications

PDFs and code, data, and materials for all my papers are available at my lab's website. You can also browse on my Google Scholar profile.

• Frank, M. C., Braginsky, M., Cachia, J., Coles, N. A., Hardwicke, T. E., Hawkins, R. D., Mathur, M. B., and Williams, R. 2024. Experimentology: An Open Science Approach to Experimental Psychology Methods. MIT Press.
• Frank, M. C., Braginsky, M., Yurovsky, D., and Marchman, V. A. (2021). Variability and Consistency in Early Language Learning: The Wordbank Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• ManyBabies Consortium (2020). Quantifying sources of variability in infancy research using the infant-directed speech preference. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 3, 24-52.
• Bohn, M. and Frank, M. C. (2020). The pervasive role of pragmatics in early language. Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, 1, 223-249.
• Frank, M. C. and Goodman, N. D. (2014). Inferring word meanings by assuming that speakers are informative. Cognitive Psychology, 75, 80-96.

Teaching

• Human Biology 3B/4B - Health, Behavior, and Development - Winter 18-19, Spring 19-20, Spring 20-21, Spring 21-22, Spring 22-23, Spring 23-34
• Psych 60 - Intro to Developmental Psych - Spring 10-11, Fall 11-12, Fall 12-13, Spring 13-14, Fall 14-15, Fall 15-16, Fall 16-17
• Psych 251 - Experimental Methods - Fall 17-18, Fall 18-19, Fall 19-20, Fall 20-21, Fall 21-22, Fall 22-23, Fall 23-24
• Psych 254 - Lab in Experimental Methods - Winter 11-12, Winter 12-13, Winter 14-15, Winter 15-16
• Seminars:
  • Models of Language Acquisition (Winter 10-11)
  • Context Dependence (Spring 11-12, with Chris Potts)
  • Origins of Communication (Fall 12-13, with Fei Xu)
  • Models of Social Behavior (Spring 13-15, with Jamil Zaki and Noah Goodman)
  • Experimental Pragmatics (Winter 14-15)
  • What Changes in Development? (Spring 15-16, with Alison Gopnik)
  • Language and Thought (Spring 16-17, taught at BOSP Santiago)
  • Psychometrics and Automated Experiment Design (Fall 19-20, with Noah Goodman)
  • Topics in Natural and Artificial Intelligence (Winter 23-24, with Noah Goodman)
• Other: Eye-tracking workshop (CSLI 2013), Experimental Pragmatics (ESSLLI 2014)