Co-Founder & Language Pedagogy
Ingrid holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Oslo. Her research focuses on corporate communication pedagogy and second-language acquisition for adult professionals.
Dr. Ingrid Larsen is a specialist in adult Second Language Acquisition (SLA) with a career dedicated to unraveling the cognitive and emotional barriers that cause fluent writers to experience speaking paralysis. Over 14 years of laboratory and clinical research, Dr. Larsen investigated how social evaluative threat elevates the affective filter, demonstrating that anxiety directly restricts working memory capacity and prevents rapid lexical access during spontaneous speech.
Prior to co-founding nthoughts, Ingrid advised multinational technology organizations across Northern Europe and Southeast Asia on corporate communication pedagogy. She observed that traditional corporate language training—such as scripted roleplays and human tutoring—often exacerbated evaluative anxiety in technical professionals, rather than alleviating it. This prompted her to pioneer low-affective-filter conversational modeling.
At nthoughts, Dr. Larsen leads pedagogical research and conversational design. She architected the diagnostic grammar isolation protocols used by Maya, ensuring that errors are isolated without emotional judgment, and designed the cross-linguistic contrastive analysis frameworks that underpin the South Asian translation modules.
"Language fluency is not a function of raw intelligence or memorized rules; it is a procedural motor skill that requires physiological calm. When an adult feels safe from peer judgment, their affective filter drops, their working memory expands, and natural syntactic retrieval flourishes."
Explore the neuroscience behind why second-language speakers freeze during corporate standups and how low-stakes simulated dialogue overrides the brain's threat responses.
August 8, 2026 · 6 min read
A deep dive into why prepositions (in, on, at, for) cause the highest error rates among advanced ESL professionals and how to automate intuitive recall.
August 10, 2026 · 5 min read
Join the beta and start practising with Maya today. No card required.
Start speaking freeNo card required · Free during launch
