Why was Hungarian so Important for Brian? Language Teaching Research Quarterly

Brian MacWhinney started to study Hungarian for a psycholinguistic perspective from the 1970s on. The paper surveys his work on the unfolding of child morphology based on diary data, his experiments on morphological productivity in children of different ages, and his experiments on sentence processing in children and adults. By studying the unfolding of morphology, the emergence of sentence interpretation patterns, and the processing of relative clauses Brian MacWhinney certainly made two services to Hungarian psycholinguistics. He provided the domain with rich data for anyone coming from all theoretical orientations. At the same time, by relying on some peculiarities of the structure of Hungarian, he has put Hungarian into the center of discussions about the status of rules, the analytic and holistic approaches of sentence processing, and in general the import of a functionalist attitude towards language.