Marisa Casillas
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 806576 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Marisa Casillas |
| NOMBRES | Marisa |
| APELLIDO | Casillas |
| FIRMA | CASILLAS M |
| AFILIACIONES | Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5417-0505 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 27 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 11 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 26 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2011 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Charting New Paths in the Study of Kin Term Acquisition
Kin terms appear among infants’ earliest words, yet a full mastery of kin concepts typically emerges only in late childhood. This prolonged developmental trajectory reflects not only children's acquisition of an abstract relational system of words, but also their growing understanding of social relationships and interactional norms. In this paper, we review research on kin term acquisition from three perspectives: word learning, language socializ…
The Development of Canonical Proportion as a Function of Community, Multilingualism, and Target Language’s Syllable Complexity
This study investigates the development of canonical proportion (CP), an indicator of speech development, across diverse language and environmental contexts. Using the Speech Maturity Dataset (SMD) comprising 366 children, aged 0;2-6;4, across 10 different languages and cultures, we explore the influence of multilingual exposure, language syllable complexity, and community type (industrialised, non-industrialised) on CP. We find that monolingual …
A cross-linguistic examination of young children’s everyday language experiences
We present an exploratory cross-linguistic analysis of the quantity of target-child-directed speech and adult-directed speech in North American English (US & Canadian), United Kingdom English, Argentinian Spanish, Tseltal (Tenejapa, Mayan), and Yélî Dnye (Rossel Island, Papuan), using annotations from 69 children aged 2–36 months. Using a novel methodological approach, our cross-linguistic and cross-cultural findings support prior work suggesting…
More Than Looks
The lack of diversity in the language sciences has increasingly been criticized as it holds the potential for producing flawed theories. Research on (i) geographically diverse language communities and (ii) on sign languages is necessary to corroborate, sharpen, and extend existing theories. This study contributes a case study of adapting a well-established paradigm to study the acquisition of sign phonology in Kata Kolok, a sign language of rural…
Little evidence for a noun bias in Tseltal spontaneous speech
This study examines whether children acquiring Tseltal (Mayan) demonstrate a noun bias – an overrepresentation of nouns in their early vocabularies. Nouns, specifically concrete and animate nouns, are argued to universally predominate in children’s early vocabularies because their referents are naturally available as bounded concepts to which linguistic labels can be mapped. This early advantage for noun learning has been documented using multipl…
Characterization of children's verbal input in a forager‐farmer population using long‐form audio recordings and diverse input definitions
There is little systematically collected quantitative empirical data on how much linguistic input children in small‐scale societies encounter, with some estimates suggesting low levels of directed speech. We report on an ecologically‐valid analysis of speech experienced over the course of a day by young children ( N = 24, 6–58 months old, 33% female) in a forager‐horticulturalist population of lowland Bolivia. A permissive definition of input (i.…
Combining observational and experimental approaches to the development of language and communication in rural samples
Multiple approaches - including observational and experimental - are necessary to articulate powerful theories of learning. Our field's key questions, which rely on these varied methods, are still open. How do children perceive and produce language? What do they encounter in their linguistic input? What does the learner bring to the task of acquisition? Considerable progress has been made for the development of spoken English (especially by North…
(Non-)effects of linguistic environment on early stable consonant production
Recent evidence shows that children reach expected basic linguistic milestones in two rural Indigenous communities, Tseltal and Yélî, despite their infrequent exposure to child-directed speech from adults. However, those results were partly based on measures that are fairly robust to environmental variation, e.g. the onset of babbling. By contrast, directed speech input is typically linked to lexical development, which is environmentally sensitiv…
What ‘diversity’ means depends on your perspective
Having recognized the need for diversity spotlighted by Kidd and Garcia – but given that sampling all the world’s languages is infeasible – we focus on which dimensions of variability researchers should prioritize. We consider three major approaches to the study of child language learning, namely, language as a (1) cognitive puzzle, (2) clinical/educational object, and (3) window onto socialization. We discuss how what is important about ‘diversi…
Characterization of children's verbal input in a forager-farmer population using long-form audio recordings and diverse input definitions
There is little systematically collected quantitative empirical data on how much linguistic input children in small-scale societies encounter, with some estimates suggesting low levels of directed speech. We report on an ecologically-valid analysis of speech experienced over the course of a day by young children (N = 24, 6–58 months old, 33% female) in a forager-horticulturalist population of lowland Bolivia. A permissive definition of input (i.e…
Combining observational and experimental approaches to the development of language and communication in rural samples
Multiple approaches—including observational and experimental—are necessary to articulate powerful theories of learning. Our field’s key questions, which rely on these varied methods, are still open: How do children perceive and produce language? What do they encounter in their linguistic input? What does the learner bring to the task of acquisition? Considerable progress has been made for the development of spoken English (especially by North Ame…
Everyday language input and production in 1001 children from 6 continents
Language is a universal human ability, acquired readily by young children who otherwise struggle with many basics of survival1,2. And yet, language is variable across individuals. Behavioral and experimental observations suggest that children’s linguistic skills vary with factors like socioeconomic status3, children’s gender4, and multilingualism5. But which factors really influence children’s day-to-day language use? Here we leverage speech tech…
Predicting conversational turns
n Contains fulltext :\n 248441.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)\n
Early language experience in a Papuan community
The rate at which young children are directly spoken to varies due to many factors, including (a) caregiver ideas about children as conversational partners and (b) the organization of everyday life. Prior work suggests cross-cultural variation in rates of child-directed speech is due to the former factor, but has been fraught with confounds in comparing postindustrial and subsistence farming communities. We investigate the daylong language enviro…
Vocal development in a large‐scale crosslinguistic corpus
This study evaluates whether early vocalizations develop in similar ways in children across diverse cultural contexts. We analyze data from daylong audio recordings of 49 children (1-36 months) from five different language/cultural backgrounds. Citizen scientists annotated these recordings to determine if child vocalizations contained canonical transitions or not (e.g., "ba" vs. "ee"). Results revealed that the proportion of clips reported to con…
Early Language Experience in a Tseltal Mayan Village
Daylong at-home audio recordings from 10 Tseltal Mayan children (0;2–3;0; Southern Mexico) were analyzed for how often children engaged in verbal interaction with others and whether their speech environment changed with age, time of day, household size, and number of speakers present. Children were infrequently directly spoken to, with most directed speech coming from adults, and no increase with age. Most directed speech came in the mornings, an…
Alice
Recordings captured by wearable microphones are a standard method for investigating young children’s language environments. A key measure to quantify from such data is the amount of speech present in children’s home environments. To this end, the LENA recorder and software—a popular system for measuring linguistic input—estimates the number of adult words that children may hear over the course of a recording. However, word count estimation is cha…
Alice
Recordings captured by wearable microphones are a standard method for investigating young children's language environments. A key measure to quantify from such data is the amount of speech present in children's home environments. To this end, the LENA recorder and software-a popular system for measuring linguistic input-estimates the number of adult words that children may hear over the course of a recording. However, word count estimation is cha…
Longform recordings of everyday life
Automatic word count estimation from daylong child-centered recordings in various language environments using language-independent syllabification of speech
Automatic word count estimation (WCE) from audio recordings can be used to quantify the amount of verbal communication in a recording environment. One key application of WCE is to measure language input heard by infants and toddlers in their natural environments, as captured by daylong recordings from microphones worn by the infants. Although WCE is nearly trivial for high-quality signals in high-resource languages, daylong recordings are substan…
Vocal development in a large-scale crosslinguistic corpus
This study evaluates whether early vocalizations develop in similar ways in children across diverse cultural contexts. We analyze data from daylong audio-recordings of 49 children (1-36 months) from five different language/cultural backgrounds. Citizen scientists annotated these recordings to determine if child vocalizations contained canonical transitions or not (e.g., "ba'' versus "ee''). Results revealed that the proportion of clips reported t…
A step-by-step guide to collecting and analyzing long-format speech environment (LFSE) recordings
Recent years have seen rapid technological development of devices that can record communicative behavior as participants go about daily life. This paper is intended as an end-to-end methodological guidebook for potential users of these technologies, including researchers who want to study children’s or adults’ communicative behavior in everyday contexts. We explain how long-format speech environment (LFSE) recordings provide a unique view on lang…
Turn-taking, timing, and planning in early language acquisition
Young children answer questions with longer delays than adults do, and they don't reach typical adult response times until several years later. We hypothesized that this prolonged pattern of delay in children's timing results from competing demands: to give an answer, children must understand a question while simultaneously planning and initiating their response. Even as children get older and more efficient in this process, the demands on them i…
The development of children's ability to track and predict turn structure in conversation
Dutch and English toddlers' use of linguistic cues in predicting upcoming turn transitions
Adults achieve successful coordination during conversation by using prosodic and lexicosyntactic cues to predict upcoming changes in speakership. We examined the relative weight of these linguistic cues in the prediction of upcoming turn structure by toddlers learning Dutch (Experiment 1; N = 21) and British English (Experiment 2; N = 20) and adult control participants (Dutch: N = 16; English: N = 20). We tracked participants' anticipatory eye mo…
The development of children's ability to track and predict turn structure in conversation
Dutch and English toddlers' use of linguistic cues in predicting upcoming turn transitions
Adults achieve successful coordination during conversation by using prosodic and lexicosyntactic cues to predict upcoming changes in speakership. We examined the relative weight of these linguistic cues in the prediction of upcoming turn structure by toddlers learning Dutch (Experiment 1; N = 21) and British English (Experiment 2; N = 20) and adult control participants (Dutch: N = 16; English: N = 20). We tracked participants' anticipatory eye mo…
Learning cues to category membership
Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (2013), pp. 33-45
Language in interaction
Dutch and English toddlers' use of linguistic cues in predicting upcoming turn transitions
Adults achieve successful coordination during conversation by using prosodic and lexicosyntactic cues to predict upcoming changes in speakership. We examined the relative weight of these linguistic cues in the prediction of upcoming turn structure by toddlers learning Dutch (Experiment 1; N = 21) and British English (Experiment 2; N = 20) and adult control participants (Dutch: N = 16; English: N = 20). We tracked participants' anticipatory eye mo…
Turn-taking, timing, and planning in early language acquisition
Young children answer questions with longer delays than adults do, and they don't reach typical adult response times until several years later. We hypothesized that this prolonged pattern of delay in children's timing results from competing demands: to give an answer, children must understand a question while simultaneously planning and initiating their response. Even as children get older and more efficient in this process, the demands on them i…
The development of children's ability to track and predict turn structure in conversation
Automatic word count estimation from daylong child-centered recordings in various language environments using language-independent syllabification of speech
Automatic word count estimation (WCE) from audio recordings can be used to quantify the amount of verbal communication in a recording environment. One key application of WCE is to measure language input heard by infants and toddlers in their natural environments, as captured by daylong recordings from microphones worn by the infants. Although WCE is nearly trivial for high-quality signals in high-resource languages, daylong recordings are substan…
Vocal development in a large-scale crosslinguistic corpus
This study evaluates whether early vocalizations develop in similar ways in children across diverse cultural contexts. We analyze data from daylong audio-recordings of 49 children (1-36 months) from five different language/cultural backgrounds. Citizen scientists annotated these recordings to determine if child vocalizations contained canonical transitions or not (e.g., "ba'' versus "ee''). Results revealed that the proportion of clips reported t…
A step-by-step guide to collecting and analyzing long-format speech environment (LFSE) recordings
Recent years have seen rapid technological development of devices that can record communicative behavior as participants go about daily life. This paper is intended as an end-to-end methodological guidebook for potential users of these technologies, including researchers who want to study children’s or adults’ communicative behavior in everyday contexts. We explain how long-format speech environment (LFSE) recordings provide a unique view on lang…
Early Language Experience in a Tseltal Mayan Village
Daylong at-home audio recordings from 10 Tseltal Mayan children (0;2–3;0; Southern Mexico) were analyzed for how often children engaged in verbal interaction with others and whether their speech environment changed with age, time of day, household size, and number of speakers present. Children were infrequently directly spoken to, with most directed speech coming from adults, and no increase with age. Most directed speech came in the mornings, an…
Alice
Recordings captured by wearable microphones are a standard method for investigating young children’s language environments. A key measure to quantify from such data is the amount of speech present in children’s home environments. To this end, the LENA recorder and software—a popular system for measuring linguistic input—estimates the number of adult words that children may hear over the course of a recording. However, word count estimation is cha…
Alice
Recordings captured by wearable microphones are a standard method for investigating young children's language environments. A key measure to quantify from such data is the amount of speech present in children's home environments. To this end, the LENA recorder and software-a popular system for measuring linguistic input-estimates the number of adult words that children may hear over the course of a recording. However, word count estimation is cha…
Longform recordings of everyday life
Early language experience in a Papuan community
The rate at which young children are directly spoken to varies due to many factors, including (a) caregiver ideas about children as conversational partners and (b) the organization of everyday life. Prior work suggests cross-cultural variation in rates of child-directed speech is due to the former factor, but has been fraught with confounds in comparing postindustrial and subsistence farming communities. We investigate the daylong language enviro…
Vocal development in a large‐scale crosslinguistic corpus
This study evaluates whether early vocalizations develop in similar ways in children across diverse cultural contexts. We analyze data from daylong audio recordings of 49 children (1-36 months) from five different language/cultural backgrounds. Citizen scientists annotated these recordings to determine if child vocalizations contained canonical transitions or not (e.g., "ba" vs. "ee"). Results revealed that the proportion of clips reported to con…
(Non-)effects of linguistic environment on early stable consonant production
Recent evidence shows that children reach expected basic linguistic milestones in two rural Indigenous communities, Tseltal and Yélî, despite their infrequent exposure to child-directed speech from adults. However, those results were partly based on measures that are fairly robust to environmental variation, e.g. the onset of babbling. By contrast, directed speech input is typically linked to lexical development, which is environmentally sensitiv…
What ‘diversity’ means depends on your perspective
Having recognized the need for diversity spotlighted by Kidd and Garcia – but given that sampling all the world’s languages is infeasible – we focus on which dimensions of variability researchers should prioritize. We consider three major approaches to the study of child language learning, namely, language as a (1) cognitive puzzle, (2) clinical/educational object, and (3) window onto socialization. We discuss how what is important about ‘diversi…
Characterization of children's verbal input in a forager-farmer population using long-form audio recordings and diverse input definitions
There is little systematically collected quantitative empirical data on how much linguistic input children in small-scale societies encounter, with some estimates suggesting low levels of directed speech. We report on an ecologically-valid analysis of speech experienced over the course of a day by young children (N = 24, 6–58 months old, 33% female) in a forager-horticulturalist population of lowland Bolivia. A permissive definition of input (i.e…
Combining observational and experimental approaches to the development of language and communication in rural samples
Multiple approaches—including observational and experimental—are necessary to articulate powerful theories of learning. Our field’s key questions, which rely on these varied methods, are still open: How do children perceive and produce language? What do they encounter in their linguistic input? What does the learner bring to the task of acquisition? Considerable progress has been made for the development of spoken English (especially by North Ame…
Everyday language input and production in 1001 children from 6 continents
Language is a universal human ability, acquired readily by young children who otherwise struggle with many basics of survival1,2. And yet, language is variable across individuals. Behavioral and experimental observations suggest that children’s linguistic skills vary with factors like socioeconomic status3, children’s gender4, and multilingualism5. But which factors really influence children’s day-to-day language use? Here we leverage speech tech…
Predicting conversational turns
n Contains fulltext :\n 248441.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)\n
Combining observational and experimental approaches to the development of language and communication in rural samples
Multiple approaches - including observational and experimental - are necessary to articulate powerful theories of learning. Our field's key questions, which rely on these varied methods, are still open. How do children perceive and produce language? What do they encounter in their linguistic input? What does the learner bring to the task of acquisition? Considerable progress has been made for the development of spoken English (especially by North…
More Than Looks
The lack of diversity in the language sciences has increasingly been criticized as it holds the potential for producing flawed theories. Research on (i) geographically diverse language communities and (ii) on sign languages is necessary to corroborate, sharpen, and extend existing theories. This study contributes a case study of adapting a well-established paradigm to study the acquisition of sign phonology in Kata Kolok, a sign language of rural…
Little evidence for a noun bias in Tseltal spontaneous speech
This study examines whether children acquiring Tseltal (Mayan) demonstrate a noun bias – an overrepresentation of nouns in their early vocabularies. Nouns, specifically concrete and animate nouns, are argued to universally predominate in children’s early vocabularies because their referents are naturally available as bounded concepts to which linguistic labels can be mapped. This early advantage for noun learning has been documented using multipl…
Characterization of children's verbal input in a forager‐farmer population using long‐form audio recordings and diverse input definitions
There is little systematically collected quantitative empirical data on how much linguistic input children in small‐scale societies encounter, with some estimates suggesting low levels of directed speech. We report on an ecologically‐valid analysis of speech experienced over the course of a day by young children ( N = 24, 6–58 months old, 33% female) in a forager‐horticulturalist population of lowland Bolivia. A permissive definition of input (i.…
A cross-linguistic examination of young children’s everyday language experiences
We present an exploratory cross-linguistic analysis of the quantity of target-child-directed speech and adult-directed speech in North American English (US & Canadian), United Kingdom English, Argentinian Spanish, Tseltal (Tenejapa, Mayan), and Yélî Dnye (Rossel Island, Papuan), using annotations from 69 children aged 2–36 months. Using a novel methodological approach, our cross-linguistic and cross-cultural findings support prior work suggesting…
Psychology (19 obras) · Language Development and Disorders (17 obras) · Linguistics (17 obras) · Computer Science (16 obras) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (12 obras) · Multilingual Education and Policy (8 obras) · Developmental psychology (7 obras) · Sociology (7 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (6 obras) · Cognitive psychology (6 obras)