Caroline Rowland

Caroline Rowland

Director of the Language Development Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics • Professor of First Language Acquisition, Radboud University

Caroline Rowland is Director of the Language Development Department, is a Professor of First Language Acquisition at Radboud University and Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Liverpool, and is co-Director of the ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (www.lucid.ac.uk), a multi-million pound collaboration between the Universities of Manchester, Liverpool, Lancaster.

Her research focuses on how children learn to communicate with language, how the developing brain supports this process, and how it is affected by cross-linguistic, cultural and individual variation. She takes a multiple methods approach - experimental work, naturalistic data analysis and computer modelling – to test the predictions of different models of the child’s learning mechanism. Her book, Understanding Child Language Acquisition, is an introduction to the most important research on child language acquisition over the last fifty years, and to some of the most influential theories in the field.