Dr. Erik Thiessen

Biography

Erik Thiessen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. His research primarily explores learning from infancy through childhood, focusing on the cognitive mechanisms that enable infants to acquire a substantial amount of information. His work emphasizes the role of statistical learning in language acquisition, investigating how infants use auditory regularities—such as phonotactic and prosodic patterns, word forms, and syntactic structures—to predict subsequent linguistic input. Thiessen's experiments aim to understand both the similarities and differences in the learning processes of infants compared to adults, exploring how prior experiences can facilitate or impair learning. He leads the Infant Language Learning Lab, where these questions are meticulously examined through experimental approaches. Through his scholarly contributions, he has offered significant insights into the cognitive processes underlying language development in early childhood.

Research Interests

Experience