2024- 25 Pilot-testing a cross-cultural field-friendly infant-directed speech preference paradigm

Tsimane infants, growing up in a small-scale subsistence society in lowlands Bolivia, encounter relatively little talk directed to them from adults. Instead, they encounter higher amounts of talk directed to them from other children. In this project, we ask how this set of early experiences shapes Tsimane children's attention to different kinds of language in their environment. Specifically, we will use an experimental paradigm ("preferential looking") to examine whether and when Tsimane infants prefer infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS) that is either produced by children or by adults. This classic experimental paradigm needs major adaptations and piloting before it is ready to be implemented with Tsimane participants, or any other rural field site. The goals of the project are therefore to develop and test an appropriate method for immediate use with Tsimane infants. The results of this project will add to our knowledge about the influence of early language exposure on infants' perceptual preferences and attention to language beyond the English-speaking North American populations typically studied. The primary product of this project will be a freely available and thoroughly documented set-up for adapting this paradigm in a field-friendly, low-cost, and cross-cultural experimental manner.

2023-24: Implementing a cross-cultural field-friendly Infant-Directed-Speech Preference study

Biography

Dr. Marisa Casillas is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Trained in linguistics and psychology, she is interested in exploring how cognitive and social processes shape the ways in which we learn, perceive, and produce language. She uses a combination of experimental- and observation-based methods to comparatively investigate communication and language in both urban and rural contexts, with both children in and adults. Dr. Casillas and her lab—the Chatter Lab at the University of Chicago—work on these topics in populations around the globe. In the last few years, their work has taken place in: urban and suburban North American communities, urban and suburban communities in the Netherlands, a rural Tseltal Mayan community in Chiapas, Mexico, and in a rural island community in Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. More information about current projects in her research group can be found at: https://chatterlab.uchicago.edu. This work has been collaboratively developed by Drs. Camila Scaff (University of Zurich), Ruthe Foushee (New School for Social Science Research), and Marisa Casillas (University of Chicago).