Elena Lieven is a Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany). She is Director of the Max Planck Child Study Centre in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Manchester and holds a Professorship there and an Honorary Professorship at Leipzig University. She studied Experimental Psychology at Cambridge and then did her PhD on language development at Cambridge before moving to the University of Manchester. From 1996 - 2005 she was Editor of the Journal of Child Language.
Elena has been centrally involved in the design and collection of naturalistic child language corpora initially funded by the ESRC and, more recently, has collected a number of 'Dense databases' funded by the Max Planck. She is a member of the The Chintang and Puma Documentation Project, a DOBES project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation aiming at the linguistic and ethnographic description of two endangered Sino-Tibetan languages of Nepal.
Elena Lieven’s principal areas of research involve: usage-based approaches to language development; the emergence and construction of grammar; the relationship between input characteristics and the process of language development; and variation in children's communicative environments.
Elena Lieven is the sister of Anatol Lieven and Dominic Lieven.
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