Caroline F. Rowland
researcher
Caroline F. Rowland (born 1971) is a British psychologist and linguist known for her work on child first language development, grammar acquisition, and the role of environment in child's language growth. Since 2016, she has been the Director of the Language Development Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. She holds the position of Professor of First Language Acquisition by Special Appointment at Donders Centre for Cognition at Radboud University Nijmegen. She has also been an Honorary Research Associate in Psychological Sciences at University of Liverpool since 2018.
Biography
Rowland received her B.A. degree in Psychology from the University of Manchester (UK) in 1993, under the supervision of Elena Lieven. She obtained her Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Nottingham (UK) in 2000. Her dissertation, The acquisition of wh-questions in early English multi-word speech, was supervised by Julian Pine. This study analyzed the data from twelve 2 to 3 years old children collected over a year and provided detailed evidence for children's early wh-question development from a constructivist perspective.
Prior to joining the Language Development Department at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Rowland held a position as a professor of developmental psychology in the Department of Psychological Sciences at University of Liverpool from 2001 to 2016. From 2014 to 2019, she was a co-director of the International Center for Language and Communicative Development (LuCid), which is a research collaboration established jointly by University of Manchester, University of Liverpool, and University of Lancaster and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
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