Displaying 1 - 44 of 44
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Lammertink, I., Rowland, C. F., & Casillas, M. (2024). Who’s next? Turn anticipation in Dutch preschoolers with and without Developmental Language Disorder. Poster presented at the 16th International Congress for the Study of Child Language (IASCL 2024), Prague, Czech Republic.
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Foushee, R., Byrne, D., Casillas, M., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2021). Differential impacts of linguistic alignment across caregiver-child dyads and levels of linguistic structure. Talk presented at the 34th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (CUNY 2021). online. 2021-03-04 - 2021-03-06.
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Casillas, M. (2020). Day-wide patterns in the use of child-directed speech in two non-Western, subsistence farming communities. Talk presented at the Virtual International Congress of Infant Studies (vICIS 2020). Glasgow, UK. 2020-07-06 - 2020-07-09.
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Casillas, M. (2020). Live Webinar: Data Repositories: Resources for studying development [invited presentation]. Talk presented at the Virtual International Congress of Infant Studies (vICIS 2020). Glasgow, UK. 2020-07-06 - 2020-07-09.
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Casillas, M. (2020). The linguistic landscapes of learning in two small-scale societies. Talk presented at the Virtual International Congress of Infant Studies (vICIS 2020). Glasgow, UK. 2020-07-06 - 2020-07-09.
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Cristia, A., Farabolini, G., Scaff, C., Havron, N., Stieglitz, J., & Casillas, M. (2020). The role of experience in shaping language processing: Insights from non-industrial communities in Bolivia and Papua New Guinea. Poster presented at Many Paths to Language (MPaL 2020), online.
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Lammertink, I., De Vries, M., Rowland, C. F., & Casillas, M. (2020). You and I: Using epistemic cues to predict who will talk next in conversation. Poster presented at Many Paths to Language (MPaL 2020), online.
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MacDonald, K., Räsänen, O., Casillas, M., & Warlaumont, A. S. (2020). Measuring prosodic predictability in children’s home language environments. Talk presented at the 42nd Annual Virtual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2020). Toronto, Canada. 2020-07-29 - 2020-08-01.
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Peute, A. A. K., & Casillas, M. (2020). Development of consonants in canonical babble - Language acquisition in Yélî Dnye and Tseltal. Poster presented at Many Paths to Language (MPaL 2020), online.
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Scaff, C., Casillas, M., Stieglitz, J., & Cristia, A. (2020). Exploring conversational exchanges and addressees among Tsimane forager-horticulturalists. Poster presented at Many Paths to Language (MPaL 2020), online.
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Casillas, M., Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (2019). How much speech do Tseltal Mayan children hear? Daylong averages and interactional bursts. Talk presented at the 4th Workshop on Infant Language Development (WILD 2019). Potsdam, Germany. 2019-06-13 - 2019-06-15.
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Casillas, M. (2019). Quantitative methods for studying verbal interaction [Invited talk]. Talk presented at EMLAR XV - Experimental Methods in Language Acquisition Research. Utrecht, The Netherlands. 2019-04-16 - 2019-04-18.
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Levinson, S. C., & Casillas, M. (2019). Ruminations on the functions and cognitive prerequisites of kinship. Talk presented at the workshop Revisiting the Evolution of Kinship Terms. Canberra, Australia. 2019-02-27 - 2019-03-01.
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Bergelson, E., Weisleder, A., Bunce, J., Rowland, C. F., Casillas, M., & Cristia, A. (2018). How different is speech input and output across subgroups? First results from >12,000 hours of naturalistic recordings. Poster presented at the 43rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 43), Boston, MA, USA.
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Casillas, M., Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (2018). Acquiring a typologically rare phonological contrast in Yélî Dnye. Poster presented at the Nijmegen Lectures 2018, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
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Roete, I., Casillas, M., Rasanen, O., & Fikkert, P. (2018). Relating maternal speech rate changes to child language proficiency. Talk presented at the Donders Discussions 2018. Nijmegen, The Netherlands. 2018-10-11 - 2018-11-12.
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Roete, I., Casillas, M., Frank, S., & Fikkert, P. (2018). The influence of input statistics on children’s language production decreases over time. Poster presented at the Nijmegen Lectures 2018, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
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Casillas, M. (2017). Documenting immersion: What’s available in children’s linguistic “input”?. Talk presented at the Workshop Key Questions and New Methods in the Language Sciences. Berg en Dal, The Netherlands. 2017-06-14 - 2017-06-17.
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Roete, I., Casillas, M., Frank, S., & Fikkert, P. (2017). The influence of input statistics on children’s language production decreases over time. Talk presented at the Lancaster Conference on Infant and Child Development. Lancaster, UK. 2017-08-23 - 2017-08-25.
Abstract
Usage-based approaches to language acquisition (e.g. Tomasello, 2003) propose that children use multi-word utterances – chunks – to build up grammatical knowledge from recurring patterns in their linguistic input. We investigate the changing influence of this statistical, chunk-based learning on children’s language production over time using the CAPPUCCINO model (McCauley & Christiansen, 2011). This model simulates child language production using chunks extracted from caregivers’ speech.
We selected orthographic transcriptions of conversations between 6 North American children and their caregivers, by sampling transcripts at 6-month intervals between 1;0 and 4;0 (Providence; Demuth, Culbertson, & Alter, 2006). The model parsed caregivers’ utterances for each child by comparing the transitional probabilities between words to a running average transitional probability, making splits between word chunks when the transitional probability between two words dropped below the current average. At the same time, the model also tracked the transitional probabilities between these discovered chunks. After training the model, we simulated children’s sentence production by reconstructing the utterances they actually used in the transcript from the chunk-to-chunk probabilities detected in the caregivers’ speech.
The number of child utterances that were reconstructed correctly based on transitional probabilities between chunks in the caregivers’ speech decreased over time (β = - 0.720, SE = 0.157, p < 0.001). However, the number of child utterances that contained words or chunks the caregivers did not use, increased (β = 0.547, SE = 0.064, p < 0.001). In other words, these results indicate that, over time, children’s speech less directly imitates chunk sequences in their caregivers’ speech, partly because their chunk combinations become more inventive. We discuss how these findings fit within broader usage-based approaches to language acquisition. -
Roete, I., Casillas, M., Frank, S., & Fikkert, P. (2017). The influence of input statistics on children’s language production decreases over time. Poster presented at the International Conference on Interdisciplinary Advances in Statistical Learning, Bilbao, Spain.
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Bögels, S., Casillas, M., & Levinson, S. C. (2016). To plan or to listen? The trade-off between comprehension and production in conversation. Poster presented at the Eighth Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL 2016), London, UK.
Abstract
Transitions between speakers in conversation are usually smooth, lasting around 200 milliseconds. Such rapid response latencies suggest that, at least sometimes, responders must begin planning their response before the ongoing turn is finished. Indeed, evidence from EEG suggests that listeners start planning their responses to questions as soon as they can, often midway through the incoming turn [1]. But given substantial overlap in the neural hardware for language production and comprehension, early response planning might incur a cost on participants’ concurrent comprehension of the ongoing turn. Do early responses come at the expense of less careful listening? We performed an EEG study in which participants played an interactive game with a confederate partner. Participants saw two pictures on their screen (e.g., a banana and a pineapple), then heard a (prerecorded) question from their partner, and then responded verbally by naming the correct picture. Participants were made to believe that their partner spoke to them live. Examples of the conditions in the experiment: 1. Early planning: 'Which object is curved and is considered to be fruit/healthy?'; 2. Late planning: 'Which object is considered to be fruit/healthy and is curved?' (response: 'the banana'). The questions were designed such that participants could start planning their response early (Example 1) or late (Example 2) in the turn. Crucially, in another part of the turn, we included either an expected word (e.g., 'fruit') or an unexpected one (e.g., 'healthy') to elicit a differential N400 effect. Our aims were two-fold: replicating the prior planning effect [1] and testing the effect of planning on comprehension. First, our results largely replicated the earlier study [1], showing a large positivity in the ERPs and an alpha/beta reduction in the time-frequency domain, both immediately following the onset of the critical information when participants could have first started planning their verbal response (i.e., 'curved'). As before [1], we interpret these effects as indicating the start of response planning. Second, and more importantly, we hypothesized that the N400 effect (the ERP difference between 'fruit' and 'healthy') would be attenuated when participants were already planning a response (i.e., in early vs. late planning). In contrast, we found an N400 effect of similar size in both the early and late planning conditions, although a small late positivity was only found in the late planning condition. Interestingly, we found a positive correlation between participants' overall response time and the size of the N400 effect after planning had started (i.e., in early planning), illustrating a trade-off between comprehension and production during turn taking. That is, quick responders showed a smaller N400 effect. We argue that their focus on production planning reduced their attention to the incoming audio signal and probably also their predictive processing, leading to a smaller N400 effect. Slow responders focused instead on the audio signal, preserving their N400 effect but delaying their response. Reference [1]: Bögels, S., Magyari, L., & Levinson, S. C. (2015). Neural signatures of response planning occur midway through an incoming question in conversation. Scientific Reports, 5: 12881. Topic Area: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics -
Casillas, M., Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (2016). Communicative development in a Mayan village. Talk presented at the Tilburg University. Tilburg, The Netherlands.
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Casillas, M. (2016). The role of linguistic cues in children’s predictions about turn taking. Talk presented at the Brain & Language Research Institute. Aix-en-Provence, France.
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De Vos, C., Casillas, M., Crasborn, O., & Levinson, S. C. (2016). Linguistic cues enabling rapid conversational turn-taking in sign. Talk presented at the Language seminar, Institut Jean-Nicod. Paris, France. 2016-10-26.
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De Vos, C., Casillas, M., Crasborn, O., & Levinson, S. C. (2016). Linguistic cues enabling rapid conversational turn-taking in sign. Talk presented at the Research Training Group 2070 "Understanding Social Relationships". Göttingen, Germany. 2016-11-07.
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De Vos, C., Casillas, M., Crasborn, O., & Levinson, S. C. (2016). Linguistic cues enabling rapid conversational turn-taking in Sign Language of the Netherlands. Talk presented at the Grammar & Cognition colloquium. Nijmegen, The Netherlands. 2016-12-08.
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De Vos, C., Casillas, M., Crasborn, O., & Levinson, S. C. (2016). Stroke-to-stroke turn-boundary prediction in Sign Language of the Netherlands. Poster presented at the 12th International Conference on Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research (TISLR12), Melbourne, Australia.
Additional information
Abstract of poster -
De Vos, C., Casillas, M., Crasborn, O., & Levinson, S. C. (2016). The role of facial expressions in the anticipation of turn-ends. Talk presented at the International Gesture Conference (ISGS 2016). Paris, France. 2016-07-18 - 2016-07-22.
Additional information
abstract -
Casillas, M., & De Vos, C. (2015). The perception of stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries in signed conversation. Talk presented at the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2015). Pasadena, CA. 2015-07-22 - 2015-07-25.
Abstract
Speaker transitions in conversation are often brief, with minimal vocal overlap. Signed languages appear to defy this pattern with frequent, long spans of simultaneous signing. But recent evidence suggests that turn boundaries in signed language may only include the content-bearing parts of the turn (from the first stroke to the last), and not all turn-related movement (from first preparation to final retraction). We tested whether signers were able to anticipate “stroke-to-stroke” turn boundaries with only minimal conversational context. We found that, indeed, signers anticipated turn boundaries at the ends of turn-final strokes. Signers often responded early, especially when the turn was long or contained multiple possible end points. Early responses for long turns were especially apparent for interrogatives—long interrogative turns showed much greater anticipation compared to short ones. -
Hilbrink, E., Casillas, M., & Lammertink, I. (2015). Do twelve-month-olds discriminate between typical and atypical turn timing?. Talk presented at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. Leiden, The Netherlands. 2015-09-02 - 2015-09-05.
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Hilbrink, E., Casillas, M., & Lammertink, I. (2015). Twelve-month-olds differentiate between typical and atypical turn-timing in conversation. Talk presented at Workshop on Infant Language Development (WILD). Stockholm. 2015-06-10 - 2015-06-12.
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De Vos, C., Casillas, M., Crasborn, O., & Levinson, S. C. (2015). Is turn timing dependent on language modality?. Talk presented at the 36th TABU Dag. Groningen, The Netherlands. 2015-06-04 - 2015-06-05.
Abstract
In spoken interactions, interlocutors carefully plan and time their utterances, minimising gaps and overlaps between consecutive turns.1 Cross-linguistic comparison indicates that spoken languages vary minimally in their turn timing.2 Pre-linguistic vocal turn taking has also been attested in the first six months of life.3 These observations suggest that the turn-taking system provides a universal basis for our linguistic capacities.4 It remains an open question, however, whether precisely-timed turn taking is solely a property of speech. It has previously been argued that, unlike speakers, signers do not attend to the one-at-a-time principle, and instead form a collaborative turn-taking floor with their interlocutors, thus having a higher degree of social tolerance for overlap.5 But recent corpus analyses of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) have revealed that, although simultaneous signing is more frequent in NGT than overlapping speech in spoken languages, the additional overlap may come as a consequence of having larger and thus slower articulators.6 The beginnings and ends of signed utterances are bookended by preparatory and retractive movements — phonetically necessary articulations that do not add to the interpretation of the utterance.7 When turn timing is calculated on the basis of stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries, NGT turn timing and turn overlap are consistent with documented averages for spoken turn taking.6 This paper presents new experimental evidence supporting the psychological reality of stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries for signers by using an adapted button-press paradigm, originally developed for measuring spoken turn prediction.8 Our results indicate that signers indeed anticipated turn boundaries at the ends of turn-final strokes. These findings are the first to experimentally support the idea that signers use something like stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries to coordinate conversational turns. They also suggest that linguistic processing, represented by participant age and age of acquisition, plays a role in the ability to use precisely-timed turns in conversation. -
De Vos, C., Casillas, M., Crasborn, O., & Levinson, S. C. (2015). Experimental evidence for stroke-to-stroke turn-boundary prediction in signed conversations. Poster presented at Formal and Experimental Approaches to Sign Language Theory (FEAST), Barcelona.
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De Vos, C., Casillas, M., Crasborn, O., & Levinson, S. C. (2015). Supersnel NGT: onderzoeksresultaten uit de Gebarenbus [invited talk]. Talk presented at Instituut voor Gebaren, Taal & Dovenstudies. Hogeschool Utrecht.
Abstract
In spontane gesprekken wisselen gebaarders steeds vlug van beurt. Gebarentaalgebruikers moeten daarom steeds op het juiste moment naar de juiste persoon kijken. Hoe voorspellen gebaarders wanneer de beurt gaat wisselen en wie deze overneemt? Wij hebben de eerste vraag onderzocht door verschillende groepen gebarentaalgebruikers (doven en horenden, jong en oud, verschillende regios) te testen. Omdat er in Nijmegen weinig (dove) gebaarders wonen, hebben we dit gedaan in ons lab op wielen: de Gebarenbus. -
Casillas, M. (2014). Learning to take turns. Talk presented at the 4th International Conference on Conversation Analysis (ICCA14). Los Angeles, USA. 2014-06-25 - 2014-06-29.
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Casillas, M., & Frank, M. C. (2014). Young children's spontaneous predictions about upcoming turn structure. Poster presented at the 19th Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies, Berlin, Germany.
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Casillas, M., & Frank, M. C. (2014). Turn prediction and linguistic processing in young children's online discourse understanding. Talk presented at the 13th International Congress for the Study of Child Language (IASCL 2014). Amsterdam, NL. 2014-07-14 - 2014-07-18.
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Hilbrink, E., Casillas, M., Bobb, S., Clark, E. V., Gattis, M., & Levinson, S. C. (2014). Turn-timing in naturalistic mother-child interactions: A longitudinal perspective. Poster presented at the 19th Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies, Berlin, Germany.
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Casillas, M., & Frank, M. C. (2013). Children spontaneously predict turn-ends during conversation. Talk presented at the 5th Biennial Conference of Experimental Pragmatics (XPRAG 2013). Utrecht, The Netherlands. 2013-09-04 - 2013-09-06.
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Casillas, M., & Amaral, P. M. (2013). Linguistic hedges guide children's inferences about category membership. Poster presented at the 5th Biennial Conference of Experimental Pragmatics (XPRAG 2013), Utrecht, The Netherlands.
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Casillas, M., & Frank, M. C. (2013). The development of predictive processes in children’s discourse understanding. Talk presented at the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013). Berlin, Germany. 2013-07-31 - 2013-08-03.
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Casillas, M., & Frank, M. C. (2013). Predictive processing during discourse comprehension. Talk presented at the 166th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. San Francisco, CA. 2013-12-02 - 2013-12-06.
Abstract
We investigate children’s online predictive processing as it occurs naturally, in conversation. We showed 129 children (1;0–7;0) short videos of improvised conversation between puppets, controlling for available linguistic information through phonetic manipulation: normal, prosody only (lowpass filtered), lexical only (rhythm controlled and pitch flattened), and none (multi-talker babble). We tracked their eye movements during the videos, measuring their anticipatory looks to upcoming speakers at points of turn switch (e.g., after a question and before an answer). Even one- and two-year-old children made accurate and spontaneous predictions about when a turn-switch would occur: they gazed at the upcoming speaker before they heard a response begin. By age three, children distinguished between different types of response-eliciting speech acts, looking faster to question- than non-question responses—but only when all linguistic information was available. By age seven, children’s gaze behavior also distinguished between rising and non-rising turns in the prosody only condition. These predictive skills rely on both lexical and prosodic information together, and are not tied to either type of information alone. We suggest that children integrate prosodic, lexical, and visual information to effectively predict upcoming linguistic material in conversation. -
Casillas, M., & Amaral, P. (2013). The internal structure of categories: resemblances and typicality in acquisition. Talk presented at the Workshop Concept Composition & Experimental Semantics/Pragmatics. Utrecht, The Netherlands. 2013-09-02 - 2013-09-05.
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Casillas, M., Hilbrink, E., Bobb, S. C., Clark, E. V., Gattis, M.-L., & Levinson, S. C. (2013). Turn-timing in naturalistic mother-child interactions: A longitudinal perspective. Poster presented at DialDam: Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (Semdial), Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Abstract
Combining data from two longitudinal studies of young children, we track the development of turn-timing in spontaneous infant-caregiver interactions. We focus on three aspects of timing: overlap, gap, and delay marking. We find evidence for early development of turn-timing skills, in-line with the Interaction Engine Hypothesis. (see attached .pdf for our 2-page abstract)
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