Ageliki Nicolopoulou, Ph.D. (1984, Developmental Psychology, University of California, Berkeley).
Dr. Nicolopoulou is currently Professor of the Psychology Department at Lehigh University. She was born in Patras, Greece (where her extended family still resides) and came to the US for her undergraduate and graduate education. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. Since then, she has held research appointments at the City University of New York/Graduate Center and the University of California at San Diego (in the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition), and has taught at UC San Diego, Smith College, and (since 1996) at Lehigh University.
Dr. Nicolopoulou’s research interests focus on:
- children’s narrative activities and their role in development, including linguistic, cognitive, social, and personality development
- the role that peer group and peer culture play in this development, especially gender identity
- the role that narrative (storytelling and reenactment) plays in promoting oral language (including narrative comprehension and production) and emotional and social understanding (including theory of mind);
- the complex interplay of storytelling and fantasy play for the development of narrative and imagination;
- comparing different narrative elicitation methods (e.g., retelling a story, using picture sequence, stories of children’s own creation) for the cognitive strengths and limitations they reveal
- cross-linguistic comparisons in a wide variety of languages (e.g., English, Greek, Turkish, and Chinese) using different narrative elicitation methods (with special interest in maintaining and switching character reference as well as the use of complex syntax—coordination and subordination)
- delineating the complex relation of narrative and reading during the preschool and elementary school years
- analysing picture storybooks to capture what makes them complex from a linguistic, narrative, and cognitive perspective;
The overarching theoretical framework that guides her research is sociocultural in nature and includes a combination of Piagetian insights with Vygotskian aspirations. She uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Her research has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, National Institutes of Health (NICHD), and the Institute of Educational Science (IES) .