Professor Elena Lieven

Photograph of Elena Lieven

Professor

  • Email: elena.lieven@manchester.ac.uk
  • Telephone: +44 (0)161 275 2580
  • Alternative Telephone: +49(0)341 3550400 (MPI-EVA, Leipzig)
  • Fax: +44 (0)161 275-2588

Research

Principal areas of research: The emergence and construction of grammar; The relationship between input characteristics and the process of language development; Variation in children’s communicative environments.

Biography

Elena Lieven did her undergraduate degree and her Ph.D. on individual differences in early language development in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. She came to Manchester in 1979. During her years at Manchester she developed close research links with members of the Department of Psychology in the University of California, Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen and spent parts of her sabbatical leaves in both places. She was been Editor of the Journal of Child Language from 1996 - 2005. In 1998 Professor Lieven was granted long-term unpaid leave to work at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. However she spends about 25% on average of her time in the Max Planck Child Study Centre which was set up in the Manchester Department when she moved to Leipzig.

Collaborators and affiliated staff

  • Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig

Selected publications

2010

  • Brandt, S., Lieven, E. & Tomasello, M. (2010). Development of word order in German complement-clause constructions: Effects of input frequencies, lexical items, and discourse function. Language, eScholarID:124443 | DOI:10.1353/lan.2010.0010
  • Lieven, E. (2010). Input and first language acquisition: Evaluating the role of frequency. Lingua, 2546. eScholarID:124449 | DOI:10.1016/j.lingua.2010.06.005
  • Matthews, D., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2010). What’s in a manner of speaking? Children’s sensitivity to partner-specific referential precedents. Developmental Psychology, 46(4), 749. eScholarID:124442 | DOI:10.1037/a0019657

2009

  • Bannard, C., Lieven, E. & Tomasello, M (2009). Modeling children's early grammatical knowledge. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 106(41), 17284-9. eScholarID:78716 | PMID:19805057 | DOI:10.1073/pnas.0905638106
  • Chan A, Lieven e, Tomasello M. (2009). Children's Understanding of the Agent-Patient relations in the Transitive construction: Cross Linguistic comparisons between Cantonese, German and English. Cognitive Linguistics, 20(2), 267-300. eScholarID:76444 | DOI:10.1515/COGL.2009.015
  • Kirjavainen, M., Theakston, A. & Lieven, E (2009). Can input explain children's me-for-I errors? J Child Lang, 36(5), 1091-114. eScholarID:78717 | PMID:19220924 | DOI:10.1017/S0305000909009350
  • Lieven E, Salomo D, Tomasello M. (2009). Two-year-old children's production of multiword utterances: A usage-based analysis. cognitive Linguistics, 20(3), 481-508. eScholarID:76446 | DOI:10.1515/COGL.2009.022

2001

  • Abbot-Smith K, Lieven EV, Tomasello M. (2001). What preschool children do and do not do with ungrammatical word orders. Cognitive Development, 16, 679-692. eScholarID:1d8230 | DOI:10.1016/S0885-2014(01)00054-5

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