Elena Lieven FBA (born 18 August 1947) is a British psychology and linguistics researcher and educator.
[1] She was a senior research scientist in the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology in Leipzig, Germany.
[3] Her principal areas of research involve: usage-based approaches to language development;[citation needed] the emergence and construction of grammar;[2] the relationship between input characteristics and the process of language development;[2] and variation in children's communicative environments.
[2] She has been involved in the design and collection of naturalistic child language corpora initially funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and, more recently, has collected a number of dense databases funded by the Max Planck Institute.
Lieven was previously the president of the International Association for the Study of Child Language.