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.Frank, M. C., Goodman, N. D., & Tenenbaum, J. (2009). Using speakers’ referential intentions to model early cross-situational word learning . Psychological Science, 20, 579-585. 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.Frank, M. C., Everett, D. L., Fedorenko, E., & Gibson, E., (2008). Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition. Cognition, 108, 819-824. 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.List of Marr Award winners published by the Cognitive Science Society
LEVANTE Project Frank is now the Director of the Data Coordinating Center for the LEVANTE project. The project is a framework to support long-term longitudinal and cross-cultural studies on what affects learning variability between children.
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