Natalie Dowling

Natalie Dowling is an Assistant Instructional Professor of Psychology in the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS) at the University of Chicago's Division of Social Sciences.

Dr. Dowling holds a PhD and MA in Comparative Human Development from the University of Chicago, where she also received a BA in Linguistics in June 2010. She completed her PhD in August 2022, indicating she is relatively early in her academic career.

Dr. Dowling's research explores how people coordinate in face-to-face interaction with more than just words, examining the development of conversational tools from infancy to adulthood. She uses an interdisciplinary perspective studying multimodal discourse across the lifespan, integrating methods and theory from developmental psychology, conversation analysis, and psycholinguistics. Her work particularly focuses on the changing functions of co-speech gestures as children become collaborative conversationalists, investigating when and why children use gestures before words and what nonverbal messages children send when speaking.

Her research primarily analyzes naturalistic interaction between children and caregivers in the Psychology Department's Language Development Project, a longitudinal study of communicative development. Her recent work examined how children spontaneously produce shrug gestures in early childhood and adolescence, demonstrating that while children produce shrug forms in infancy, they do not use them with adult-like functional flexibility even in adolescence. Her findings support the idea that pragmatic development is inherently multimodal, with verbal and nonverbal conversational skills developing together over a lengthy ontogenetic trajectory.

Her scientific contributions include:

• Research on multimodal aspects of language development
• Studies of gesture development from infancy through adolescence
• Analysis of naturalistic parent-child interactions
• Integration of methods from developmental psychology and conversation analysis

Dr. Dowling teaches general and introductory courses in psychology and the social sciences with a focus on practical application of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. Her expertise allows her to teach intermediate and advanced coursework in first language development, applied methods in observational data analysis, multimodal conversation, and socialization of face-to-face interaction. She is currently teaching Perspectives in Social Science Analysis, From Data to Manuscript in R (D2MR), and It Goes Without Saying: Conversation in Context for the 2024-2025 academic year.