Learning a language, surrounded by kin

Join the Department of Psychology for a lecture with speaker Marisa Casillas.

Marisa Casillas obtained her PhD in 2013 in Linguistics at Stanford University. She then worked at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University until 2021 when she was hired at the University of Chicago. Her research explores how cognitive and social processes shape the ways in which we learn, perceive, and produce language.

Using a combination of experimental- and observation-based methods, she investigates the relationship between communicative skills and linguistic processing in children and adults. More specifically, she examines how these processes co-develop during in 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.