Marisa Casillas

Associate Professor

Department of Comparative Human Development

Bio

Marisa Casillas is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development. Broadly speaking, she is interested in exploring how cognitive and social processes shape the ways in which we learn, perceive, and produce language. Her primary research examines the relationship between communicative skills and linguistic processing in children and adults. She and her students use a combination of experimental- and observation-based methods to comparatively investigate these processes in both urban, Western contexts and rural, Indigenous contexts. Much of her work focuses particularly on how communicative and linguistic skills co-develop during the first few years of life, with the hope of better understanding how our capacity to produce, understand, and transmit language across generations is shaped by interactive needs. Dr. Casillas’s work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Netherlands Scientific Organization, among others.

Selected Recent Publications

Bunce, J. P., Soderstrom, M., Bergelson, E., Rosemberg, C. R., Stein, A., Alam, Migdalek, M. J., & Casillas, M. (2024). A cross-linguistic examination of young children’s everyday language experiences. Journal of Child Language, FirstView, 1–29.

Casillas, M., Foushee, R., Méndez Girón, J., Polian, G., & Brown, P. (2024). Little evidence for a noun bias in Tseltal spontaneous speech. First Language, OnlineFirst, 1–29.

Bergelson, E., Soderstrom, M., Schwarz, I.C., Rowland, C., Ramirez-Esparza, N., Rague Hamrick, L., Marklund, E., Kalashnikova, M., Guez, A., Casillas, M., Benetti, L., van Alphen, P., Cristia, A. (2023). Everyday language input and production in 1001 children from 6 continents. PNAS, 120(52), e2300671120.

Casillas, M. (2023). Learning language in vivo. Child Development Perspectives, 17(1), 10–17.

Cristia, A., Foushee, R., Aravena-Bravo, P., Cychosz, M., Scaff, C., & Casillas, M. (2023). Combining observational and experimental approaches to the development of language and communication in rural samples: Opportunities and challenges. Journal of Child Language, 13, 1–23.

Cristia, A. & Casillas, M. (2022). Nonword repetition in children learning Yélî Dnye. Language Development Research, 2(1), 69–104.

De Vos, C., Casillas, M., Uittenbogert, T., Crasborn, O., & Levinson, S. C. (2022). Signers’ and non-signers’ sensitivity to language-specific and globally accessible cues in conversational turn prediction. Language, 98(1), 35–62.

Elmlinger, S. L., Goldstein, M., & Casillas, M. (2022). Immature vocalizations simplify the speech of Tseltal Mayan and US caregivers. Topics in Cognitive Science, 15(2), 315–328.

Foushee, R. & Casillas, M. (2022). What ‘diversity’ means depends on your perspective: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022). First Language, 42(6), 760–764.

Casillas, M., Brown, P. & Levinson, S. C. (2021). Early language experience in a Papuan community. Journal of Child Language, 48(4), 792–814.

Cychosz, M., Cristia, A., Bergelson, E., Casillas, M., Baudet, G., Warlaumont, A. S., Scaff, C., Yankowitz, L., & Seidl, A. (2021). Vocal development in a large-scale crosslinguistic corpus. Developmental Science, e13090.

Soderstrom, M., Casillas, M., Gornik, M., Bouchard, A., MacEwan, S., Shokrkon, A., & Bunce, J. (2021). English-speaking adults’ labeling of child- and adult-directed speech across languages and its relationship to perception of affect. Frontiers in Psychology 12, 708887.

CV

Click here to download a copy of Marisa Casillas’ CV.