What do babies say?

Meet the Team

Marisa Casillas
Marisa (she/her) is an assistant professor in the University of Chicago’s Comparative Human Development department. Before coming to Chicago, she completed her BA (UCLA) and PhD (Stanford University) in Linguistics, followed by postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. Her research draws on linguistics, psychology, and conversation analysis to investigate the foundations of human language cognition. She conducts observational and experimental work on adult and child language behavior in American English, Dutch, Tseltal (Mayan), and Yélî Dnye (isolate; Papua New Guinea), but maintains active collaborations with researchers working on other languages, including Sign Language of the Netherlands and Tsimane’. Her work, which has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Acoustical Society of America, and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, touches on a wide range of language topics, from comparative developmental language theory to open-source speech technology.

Alejandrina Cristia
Alejandrina Cristia is a senior researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and leader of the Language Acquisition Across Cultures team in the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP) cohosted by the Ecole Normale Supérieure, EHESS, and PSL. Her long-term aim is to answer the following questions: What are the linguistic representations that infants and adults have? Why and how are they formed? How may learnability biases shape the world’s languages? To answer these questions, she combines multiple methodologies including spoken corpora analyses, behavioral studies, neuroimaging (NIRS), and computational modeling. This interdisciplinary approach has resulted in over 100 publications in psychology, linguistics, and development journals as well as IEEE and similar conferences.

Meg Cychosz
Meg Cychosz is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences and the NIH-funded Center for Comparative and Evolutionary Biology of Hearing at the University of Maryland-College Park. She employs computational modeling and digital signal processing to study how the auditory environment and speech-motor apparatus interact to shape human speech patterns. Currently, she is examining these questions in cochlear implant users. She earned a Master 1 in Phonetics from Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 in 2015 and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from UC Berkeley in 2020.

Kasia Hitczenko
Kasia Hitczenko is a postdoctoral researcher in the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, where she works as part of the Language Acquisition Across Cultures team. Before coming to Paris, she got her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Maryland - College Park in 2019, before completing postdoctoral work in Linguistics at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on how infants learn about the sounds of their language, which she primarily studies using computational models and analyses of naturalistic speech corpora.

Amanda Seidl
Amanda Seidl is Professor of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences and Interim Head of the Department of Public Health at Purdue University. The overarching goal of her research program is to discover how language comes to the child. In her past work, she has focused heavily on how the child learns her phonological system. In her current research program, she is interested in early predictors of language. Specifically, this work explores the ways in which measures of early speech perception, production, and the input to the child relate to later language in both typical development and in children at-risk for autism spectrum disorders (ASDs).

Lara Assadourian
Lara Assadourian is a master student of Learning Sciences at the Learning Planet Institute. She was always interested in linguistics and the development of languages. She is an intern at the Cognitive Sciences & Psycholinguistic Laboratory (LSCP) where she assisted with creating presentations and analyzing previous studies. She also attended weekly lab meetings and seminars, where she had the opportunity to learn from some of the leading researchers in the field.