Caroline Rowland

Professor

A bit about Caroline Rowland

I am the Director of the Language Development Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Professor of First Language Acquisition at Radboud University and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool. Prior to this, I was Professor of Developmental Psychology in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Liverpool. My research focuses on how children acquire language, with a particular interest in grammar and in assessing how the child’s environment promotes and shapes language growth. I am series editor of the Trends in Language Acquisition (TiLAR) book series, and Associate Editor of the Journal of Child Language.

My Role in LuCiD

I am an International Co-Investigator for a number of LuCiD projects. Until August 2019, I was a Co-Director and the lead of the Language 0-5 project, the largest-scale study of children's language development in the UK. 

LuCiD publications (59) by Caroline Rowland

Monaghan, P., Donnelly, S., Alcock, K., Bidgood, A., Cain, K., Durrant, S., Frost, R. L. A., Jago, L., Peter, M. S., Pine, J. M., Turnbull, H., & Rowland, C. F. (2023). Learning to generalise but not segment an artificial language at 17 months predicts children’s language skills 3 years later. Cognitive Psychology

Jago, L., Alcock, K., Meints, K., Pine, J., and Rowland, C. (2023). Language outcomes from the UK-CDI Project: can risk factors, vocabulary skills and gesture scores in infancy predict later language disorders or concern for language development? Frontiers in Psychology

Lee, C., Jessop, A., Bidgood, A., Peter, M., Pine, J., Rowland, C. & Durrant, S. (2023). How executive functioning, sentence processing, and vocabulary are related at 3 years of age Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Rowland, C., Theakston, A., Ambridge, B., & Twomey, K. E. (Eds.). (2020). Current Perspectives on Child Language Acquisition: How Children Use Their Environment To Learn. Trends in Language Acquisition Research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 330 pp.

Bidgood, A., Pine, J., Rowland, C., Sala, G., Freudenthal, D. & Ambridge, B. (2021). Verb argument structure overgeneralisations for the English intransitive and transitive constructions: Grammaticality judgments and production priming. Language and Cognition Language and Cognition 13, 397–437.

Ambridge, B., Rowland, C. F., Theakston, A. L. & Twomey, K. E. (2020). Introduction. In Current Perspectives on Child Language Acquisition: How children use their environment to learn. John Benjamins pp. 1-7.

Alcock, K. J., Meints, K., Rowland, C., Brelsford, V., Christopher, A., & Just, J. (2020). UK-CDI Words and Gestures - Manual and Norms. Emsworth, UK: J & R Press.

Fazekas, J., Jessop, A., Pine, J. M. & Rowland, C. F. (2020). Do children learn from their prediction mistakes? A registered report evaluating error-based theories of language acquisition Royal Society Open Science, 7(11), 180877.

Durrant, S., Jessop, A., Chang, F., Bidgood, A., Peter, M. S., Pine, J. M. & Rowland, C. F. (2021). Does the understanding of complex dynamic events at 10 months predict vocabulary development? Language and Cognition 13, 66–98.

Bidgood, A., Pine, J. M., Rowland, C. F. & Ambridge, B. (2020). Syntactic Representations Are Both Abstract and Semantically Constrained: Evidence From Children’s and Adults’ Comprehension and Production/Priming of the English Passive Cognitive Science, 44(9), e12892.

Samanta, S., Bannard, C., Pine, J. & The Language05 Team (2020). Can automated gesture recognition support the study of child language development? In Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Toronto, ON: Cognitive Science Society.

Frost, R. L. A., Jessop, A., Durrant, S., Peter, M., Bidgood, A. Pine, J., Rowland, C. & Monaghan, P. (2020). Non-adjacent dependency learning in infancy, and its link to language development. Cognitive Psychology, 120, 101291.

Ambridge, B., Rowland, C. & Gummery, A. (2019). Teaching the unlearnable: A training study of complex yes/no questions. Language and Cognition.

Peter, M. S., Durrant, S., Jessop, A., Bidgood, A., Pine, J. M. & Rowland, C. F. (2019). Does speed of processing or vocabulary size predict later language growth in toddlers? Cognitive Psychology, 115, 101238.

Noble, C., Sala, G., Peter, M., Lingwood, J., Rowland, C., Gobet, F. & Pine, J. M. (2019). The impact of shared book reading on children’s language skills: A meta-analysis. Educational Research Review, 28, 100290.

Delle Luche, C., Kwok, R., Durrant, S., Chow, J., Horvath, K., Cattani, A., Abbot-Smith, K., Krott, A., Mills, D., Plunkett, K., Rowland, C., Floccia, C. (2016). It's a big world: Understanding the factors guiding early vocabulary development in bilinguals. International Conference on Infant Studies, New Orleans, USA.

Bidgood, A., Cameron-Faulkner, T., Durrant, S., Peter, M., Rowland, C. (2015). Multimodal input and children's gesture and vocabulary growth. Workshop on Extensive and Intensive Recordings of Children's Language Environment (WEIRCLE), Paris, France.

Bidgood, A., Cameron-Faulkner, T., Peter, M., Durrant, S., Rowland, C. (2016). The role of showing and pointing in the vocabulary growth of children aged 8-15 months. International Conference on Infant Studies, New Orleans, USA.

Rowland, C. F. (2018). Listening to children: New perspectives on the brain and on language from studies on language development. Invited talk at Max Planck Society Senate.

Rowland, C. F. (2018). What predicts how quickly children learn words? (1) Invited talk at Leiden University.

Bidgood, A., McLaughlin, P., Durrant, S., Peter, M., Pine, J., & Rowland, C. (2018). The relationship between oral-motor skills and 2 years, vocabulary production and later articulation skills. Paper presented at the Child Language Symposium, Reading, UK.

Alcock, K. J., Rowland, C., & Meints, K. (2018). The UK-CDI - Inter-dialect differences in English language CDI datasets. Paper presented at the European Network Meeting - Communicative Development Inventories, Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Rowland, C. (2018). How children learn language. Presentation at festABLE

Rowland, C. (2018). We'll never discover what is external, and what is internal, to language without multi-methodological approaches. Workshop on What is Language?, Zurich University.

Rowland, C. (2018). Lessons learned from trying to build a language acquisition device. (1) Invited talk at Child Language Symposium, Reading, UK.

Rowland, C. (2018). Lessons learned from trying to build a language acquisition device. Invited talk at AMLaP-Asia Hyderabad, India.

Rowland, C. (2018). What predicts how quickly children learn words? Workshop on Language acquisition across cultures and methodological approaches, Aarhus University, Denmark.

Rowland, C. (2018). The principles of scientific enquiry. Linguistics Approaches to Bilingualism, 8(6), 770-775.

Kidd, L., Rowland, C. (2018). The effect of language-focused professional development on the knowledge and behaviour of preschool practitioners. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy. Advance online publication. DOI:10.1177/1468798418803664

Floccia, C., Sambrook, T., Delle Luche, C., Kwok, R., Goslin, J., White, L., Cattani, A., Sullivan, E., Abbot-Smith, K., Krott, A., Mills, D., Rowland, C., Gervain, J., Plunkett, K. (2018). Vocabulary of 2-year-olds learning learning English and an additional language: Norms and effects of linguistic distance. Wiley-Blackwell.

Peter, M., Bidgood, A., Durrant, S., Pine, J., Rowland, C. (2018). Investigating the relationship between language processing efficiency, vocabulary, and working memory across development. Paper presented at Child Language Symposium, Reading, UK.

Peter, M., Rowland, C. (2018). Aligning developmental and processing accounts of implicit and statistical learning Topics in Cognitive Science DOI: 10.1111/tops.12396

Frost, R., Rowland, C., Durrant, S., Peter, M., Bidgood, A., Monaghan, P. (2018). Statistical learning in infants, and its relationship with language development: A study of nonadjacent dependency learning. Paper presented at 26th Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing (AMLaP), Berlin, Germany.

Alcock, K. J., Rowland, C. F., Meints, K., Christopher, A. E., Just, J., Brelsford, V., & Summers, J. (2017). Gesture screening in young infants with the UK-CDI: Highly sensitive to risk factors for communication delay. Poster presented at the Society for Research in Child Development, Austin, TX.

Alcock, K. J., Meints, K., & Rowland, C. (2017). Gesture screening in young infants: Highly sensitive to risk factors for communication delay. Paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Child Language, Lyon, France.

Frost, R., Peter, M., Durrant, S., Bidgood, A., Rowland, C., Monaghan, P., Christiansen, M. (2016). How do infants use nonadjacent dependencies during language development? (1) Poster presented at Fifth Implicit Learning Seminar Lancaster, UK.

Durrant, S., Peter, M., Bidgood, A., McLaughlin, P., & Rowland, C. (2017). Executive Function and Language in Typically Developing Toddlers. Paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Child Language, Lyon, France.

Durrant, S., Peter, M., Bidgood, A., Monaghan, P., Frost, R., Bannard, C., Kidd, E., & Rowland, C. (2017). Does variation in infants statistical learning ability predict variation in later vocabulary growth? Lessons learned from the Language 0-5 Project. Paper presented at the European Conference on Developmental Psychology, Utrecht, Holland.

Brand, J., Monaghan, P. and Walker, P. (2018). The Changing Role of Sound‐Symbolism for Small Versus Large Vocabularies. Cogn Sci, 42: 578-590.

Alcock, K. J., Meints, K., & Rowland, C. F. (2017). UK-CDI Words and Gestures - Preliminary norms and manual.

Durrant, S., Rowland, C. F. , Chang, F., Jessop, A., Bidgood, A., Peter, M. (2016). Chasing, causality and goals: Conceptual understanding at 9 months and its relationship to later language use. Paper presented at the XX Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies, New Orleans, LA, USA.

Bidgood, A., Cameron-Faulkner, T., Durrant, S., Peter, M. & Rowland, C.F. (2016). The role of gestures and babble in the vocabulary growth of children aged 8-18 months. Paper presented at the 1st Lancaster Conference on Infant and Child Development, Lancaster, UK.

Bidgood, A., Kirk, E., Durrant, S., Peter, M., Pine, J. & Rowland, C. (2018). Baby sign, mind-mindedness and language development. (1) Poster presented at The 3rd Lancaster Conference on Infant and Early Child Development (LCICD), Lancaster, UK.

Bidgood, A., Kirk, E., Durrant, S., Peter, M., Pine, J. & Rowland, C. (2018). Baby sign, mind-mindedness and language development. Poster presented at the 8th International Society for Gesture Studies Conference, Cape Town, South Africa.

Rowland, C. (2017). What is the relationship between Executive Function and language development? Paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Child Language, Lyon, France, July 2017

Rowland, C. F., & Monaghan, P. (2017). Developmental psycholinguistics teaches us that we need multi-method, not single-method, approaches to the study of linguistic representation. Commentary on Branigan and Pickering "An experimental approach to linguistic representation". Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40: e308. doi:10.1017/S0140525X17000565

Jones, G., & Rowland, C. F. (2017). Diversity not quantity in caregiver speech: Using computational modeling to isolate the effects of the quantity and the diversity of the input on vocabulary growth. Cognitive Psychology, 98, 1-21. doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2017.07.002.

Abbot-Smith, K., Chang, F., Rowland, C., Ferguson, H. & Pine, J. (2017). Do two and three year old children use an incremental first-NP-as-agent bias to process active transitive and passive sentences? A permutation analysis. PLoS ONE 12 (10): e0186129

Muhinyi, A., Hesketh, A., Rowland, C. and Stewart, A. (2017). Effects of story complexity on mothers' abstract language use during shared reading. Poster presented at the 14th International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Lyon: France.

Christopher, A. E., Just, J., Meints, K., Rowland, C., & Alcock, K. J. (2013). Adaptation and validation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI Gesture Scale for the UK. Paper presented at British Psychological Society, Developmental and Social Sections Conference, Reading, United Kingdom.

Monaghan, P. and Rowland, C. F. (2016). Combining Language Corpora With Experimental and Computational Approaches for Language Acquisition Research. Language Learning. doi:10.1111/lang.12221

Frost, R. L. A., Peter, M., Durrant, S., Bidgood, A., Rowland, C., Monaghan, P. & Christiansen, M. H. (2016). How do infants use nonadjacent dependencies during language development? Poster presented at the XX Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies, New Orleans, LA, USA.

Frost, R. L. A., Peter, M., Durrant, S., Bidgood, A., Rowland, C., Monaghan, P. & Christiansen, M. H. (2016). How do infants use nonadjacent dependencies during language acquisition? Poster to be presented at the Fifth Implicit Learning Seminar. Lancaster, UK.

Rowland, C. (2015). Nativism in language acquisition research: Conflict and consensus with constructivism. Paper presented at Perspectives on nativism, Edinburgh, UK.

Rowland, C. & Peter, M. (2015). Up to speed? Nursery World Magazine, 15 June, 18-20.

Ambridge, B., Bidgood, A., Pine, J. M., Rowland, C. F. & Freudenthal, D. (2016). Is passive syntax semantically constrained? Evidence from adult grammaticality judgment and comprehension studies. Cognitive Science, 40(6): 1435-59.

Brewin, K. & Rowland, C. F. (2015). Testing the validity and usability of a new language monitoring and assessment tool: The BabyTalk app. Poster presented at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference, Liverpool, UK

Ambridge, B., Bidgood, A., Twomey, K. E., Pine, J. M., Rowland, C. F. & Freudenthal, D. (2015). Preemption versus Entrenchment: Towards a construction-general solution to the problem of the retreat from verb argument structure overgeneralization. PLoS ONE, 10 (4): e0123723.

Peter, M., Chang, F., Pine, J., Blything, R. and Rowland, C. (2015). When and how do children develop knowledge of verb argument structure? Evidence from verb bias effects in a structural priming task. Journal of Memory and Language, 81, 1-15.

Search all Publications