Biography
Stephen Cowley is a Senior Lecturer
in Developmental Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire,
United Kingdom and an Honourary Research Fellow at the University
of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
Having obtained a Cambridge degree
in English (1978), he taught in Italy, Sweden and Kosova. In the
latter environment, his struggle to learn Albanian spurred him
to build on his amaeur interest in languages by taking an MA in
Linguistics at the University of Leeds in 1985. Later, this was
followed by a PhD in Linguistics from Cambridge (1989-1993). After
that, he lectured at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in the Departments
of both Linguistics (1996–1999) and Psychology (2000-2003).
More recently, he returned to the UK to a post in Social and Developmental
Psychology at the University of Bradford. In 2004, he took up
a Senior Lectureship at Hertfordshire.
Since 2000, he has worked on how
cognitive dynamics affect interaction and development. In psychology,
this has led to empirical focuses on interactions between both
caregiver-infant dyads and human-robot ones. At a theoretical
level, he is a leading advocate of the distributed view of language.
