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]

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.^[4]

Frank in 2025