Camila Scaff

Biographic Data

ID1464569
NAMECamila Scaff
GIVEN NAMESCamila
FAMILY NAMEScaff
SIGNATURESCAFF C
AFFILIATIONSCentre National de la Recherche Scientifique
ORCID0000-0002-7546-9538
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS20
TOTAL CITATIONS5
AUTHOR COUNT20
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2019
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX1

  • The Development of Canonical Proportion as a Function of Community, Multilingualism, and Target Language’s Syllable Complexity

    Open AccessKai Jia Tey, Sarah Walker et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2026

    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 …

  • Not All Stress Is the Same: Variable Associations Between Psychosocial Stressors and Urinary Cortisol Rhythms in a Small‐Scale Subsistence Society

    Open AccessDominik C Jud, Valerie Baettig et al.ARTICLEAmerican Journal of Human Biology2026

    While many of these associations had high statistical uncertainty due to wide posterior distributions, the results overall emphasize complex relationships between perceived stressors and diurnal cortisol rhythms among a small-scale subsistence-based society. Future work employing longitudinal designs and higher-resolution sampling will be needed to clarify these trends

  • Diversity as the Fuel of Theory: Demographic Biases in CHILDES and Its Commentaries

    Open AccessCamila Scaff, Georgia Loukatou et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Science2025

    We are grateful to the authors of the six commentaries on our analysis of demographic biases in the CHILDES database. The commentaries unanimously celebrate CHILDES’ contributions, as do we. CHILDES is a remarkable resource, foundational for cross-linguistic and theoretical advances in child language research and still holding extraordinary untapped potential. MacWhinney and Snow (2025) and Christiansen and McCauley (2025) argue that CHILDES corp…

  • A Meta‐Analysis of the Correlation Between Socioeconomic Status and Direct Measures of Young Children's Word Comprehension

    Open AccessCamila Scaff, Joseph R Coffey et al.ARTICLEInfancy2025

    What can we learn from the empirical body of literature on the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and children's word comprehension? To answer this question, a systematic review was carried out on studies in which samples of children varying in SES were directly assessed on their word comprehension abilities. The final analysis included 83 effect sizes from 40 independent samples, representing data from 8211 children between the ages …

  • The difficulty and importance of estimating the lower and upper bounds of infant speech exposure

    Joseph R Coffey, Okko Räsänen et al.PREPRINT2024

    Estimates of infants’ language exposure are necessary for computational studies that attempt to model and learn from infant language experiences. However, there are no well-established input estimates usable for this purpose. This paper explores empirical data on infant language exposure across various cultural settings to derive plausible limits on the speech exposure infants might receive during their first years of life. First, we argue that s…

  • Establishing the reliability of metrics extracted from long-form recordings using Lena and the Aclew pipeline

    Open AccessAlejandrina Cristia, Lucas Gautheron et al.ARTICLEBehavior Research Methods2024

    Long-form audio recordings are increasingly used to study individual variation, group differences, and many other topics in theoretical and applied fields of developmental science, particularly for the description of children's language input (typically speech from adults) and children's language output (ranging from babble to sentences). The proprietary LENA software has been available for over a decade, and with it, users have come to rely on d…

  • Characterization of children's verbal input in a forager‐farmer population using long‐form audio recordings and diverse input definitions

    Open AccessCamila Scaff, Marisa Casillas et al.ARTICLEInfancy2024

    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: Opportunities and challenges

    Open AccessAlejandrina Cristia, Rusty Foushee et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2023

    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…

  • Community-set goals are needed to increase diversity in language acquisition research: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022)

    Open AccessNaomi Havron, Camila Scaff et al.ARTICLEFirst Language2022

    This commentary argues that to increase diversity in language acquisition research, the field should define specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-defined goals, and prioritize solutions based on their importance, tractability, and neglectedness, ideally in collaboration with a variety of other agents outside the research community

  • Factors structuring lexical development in toddlers: The effects of parental education, language exposure, and age

    Open AccessCamila Scaff, Laia Fibla et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2022

    A growing body of research suggests that individual variation in young children's word comprehension (indexed by response times and accuracy) is structured and meaningful. In this paper, we assess how children's word comprehension correlates with three factors: socio-economic status (indexed by maternal education), lingual status (based on language exposure), and age. We present results from 91 2- to 3-year-old children using a paired forced-choi…

  • Characterization of children's verbal input in a forager-farmer population using long-form audio recordings and diverse input definitions

    Camila Scaff, Marisa Casillas et al.PREPRINT2022

    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: Opportunities and challenges

    Alejandrina Cristia, Rusty Foushee et al.PREPRINT2022

    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…

  • Child-directed and overheard input from different speakers in two distinct cultures

    Open AccessGeorgia Loukatou, Camila Scaff et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2022

    Despite the fact that in most communities interaction occurs between the child and multiple speakers, most previous research on input to children focused on input from mothers. We annotated recordings of Sesotho-learning toddlers living in non-industrial Lesotho in South Africa, and French-learning toddlers living in urban regions in France. We examined who produced the input (mothers, other children, adults), how much input was child directed, a…

  • Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures

    Open AccessCourtney B Hilton, Cody J Moser et al.ARTICLENature Human Behaviour2022Cited by: 5References: 97

  • Vocal development in a large‐scale crosslinguistic corpus

    Open AccessMargaret Cychosz, Alejandrina Cristia et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Science2021

    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…

  • Priming syntactic ambiguity resolution in children and adults

    Naomi Havron, Camila Scaff et al.PREPRINT2020

    Adults use their recent experience to disambiguate ambiguous sentences: Structures that haverecently been primed are favored in the resolution of different types of ambiguity, an example ofstructural priming. Research on children’s use of recent information for disambiguation is scarce.Using a forced-choice task with a tablet, we asked whether 5-6-year-old French-speakingchildren could also be primed in the resolution of attachment ambiguities, a…

  • A thorough evaluation of the Language Environment Analysis (Lena) system

    Open AccessAlejandrina Cristia, Marvin Lavechin et al.ARTICLEBehavior Research Methods2020

  • Longform recordings of everyday life: Ethics for best practices

    Open AccessMargaret Cychosz, Rachel Romeo et al.ARTICLEBehavior Research Methods2020

  • A thorough evaluation of the Language Environment Analysis (Lenatm) system

    Alejandrina Cristia, Marvin Lavechin et al.PREPRINT2019

    In the previous decade, dozens of studies involving thousands of children across several research disciplines have made use of a combined daylong audio-recorder and automated algorithmic analysis called the LENA^®^ system, which aims to assess children's language environment. While the system's prevalence in the language acquisition domain is steadily growing, there are only scattered validation efforts, on only some of its key characteristics. H…

  • Vocal development in a large-scale crosslinguistic corpus

    Margaret Cychosz, Alejandrina Cristia et al.PREPRINT2019

    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…