Prof. Caroline Rowland appointed professor by special appointment of First Language Acquisition

Caroline Rowland is Managing Director of the Language Development Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and co-Director of the ESRC LuCiD Centre at the University of Liverpool in the UK. 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.

Caroline Rowland graduated with a B.A. (Hons.) degree in Psychology from the University of Manchester (UK) in 1993 and obtained her PhD at the University of Nottingham (UK) in 2000 with her thesis entitled: 'The acquisition of wh-questions in early English multi-word speech'.