Biography:

Erik Thiessen is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon, principal investigator of the  Infant Language and Learning Lab, and Director of Undergraduate Education in Psychology at CMU. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004.  His research focuses on learning in infancy and childhood, with a particular focus on statistical learning, the ability to identify structure from probabilistic relations among elements of the input. Dr. Thiessen’s experiments explore how language develops between infancy and adulthood, differences and similarities in first and second language acquisition, and how language learning emerges from more general characteristics of the human cognitive architecture such as memory and attention.