Marianella Casasola
Prof Assoc
2008
HD

Web Bio Page

Current Activities

Current Professional Activities
Society for Research in Child Development, Member
International Society on Infant Studies, Member
American Psychological Society, Member
Cognitive Development Society, Member
Ad-hoc reviewer for Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Psychological Science, Developmental Science, Cognition, & Infancy

Current Research Activities
My research program focuses on infant cognitive development and early word learning. I am particularly interested in the interaction between cognition and language  during the first two years of development. In collaboration with colleagues and students, I examine infants' ability to discriminate the spatial relations between objects as well as their ability to group these events into spatial categories. A portion of my research explores the degree to which infants' perceptual and cognitive abilities provide them with the meanings expressed across language-specific semantic categories (e.g., "in", "on", "out" and "off"). The goal of this line of research is to document not only which spatial concepts infants understand (and when they acquire these concepts), but also to delineate the processes that guide how infants acquire this understanding. I also explore how specific linguistic input can aid infants in forming spatial categories that they do not form in the absence of a specific spatial word. In related research, we are exploring how novel spatial language can direct infants' attention to the spatial relations versus the objects in a dynamic event. More recently, we have begun to explore how toddlers learn to form novel semantic spatial categories. Work with my students has focused on exploring issues related to infants' categorization of objects, their ability to learn novel labels for objects, and their ability to map novel labels in an unfamiliar language, such as Spanish, to objects. In collaboration with Professor Gary Evans and several graduate students, I am beginning to explore how infants' cognitive abilities may interact with their socio-emotional abilities in early development. In sum, my students and I are conducting numerous experimental and also some semi-naturalistic studies that explore developmental changes in infant cognitive development, their socio-emotional abilities, how these of these abilities are recruited in the acquisition of language, and whether language can facilitate the development of infants' cognitive and socio-emotional abilities.

Biography

Biographical Statement
Marianella Casasola earned her undergraduate degrees in Psychology and Spanish Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. While earning her Master's and  Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, she began to explore the relationship between thought and language during early development. She continues to pursue research in this area by studying infants raised in different linguistic environments. Much of her research focuses on the development of infants' spatial concepts (their understanding of spatial relations such as "in" and "on"), an area which lends itself well to the study of how language and thought mutually influence each other's development. Recent work in collaboration with Jui Bhagwat has begun to explore infants' ability to learn labels in a second language. She also is collaborating with Dr. Gary Evans to explore the link between cognitive and socio-emotional abilities during the first two years of development.  

Administrative Responsibilities
Director, Undergraduate Honors Program, Fall 2005-present
Member, Undergraduate Education Committee


Courses, Websites, Pubs

Courses Taught
HD 3820: Research Methods in Human Development 
HD 4980: Honors Thesis Seminar for Human Development
HD 6360: Graduate seminar in Connecting Social, Cognitive, and Emotional Development
HD 6860: Graduate seminar in Research Methods


Related Websites

Cornell Infant Studies Lab



Selected Publications

Casasola, M., Bhagwat, J., & Burke, A. S. (in press). Learning to form a spatial category of tight-fit relations: How experience with a label can give a boost. Developmental Psychology.

Ferguson, K.T., Kulkofsky, S., Casasola, M., & Cashon, C. (in press). The development of specialized processing of own-race faces in infancy. Infancy.

Casasola, M. (in press). Infant spatial categorization from an information processing approach.  In L. M. Oakes, C. H. Cashon, M. Casasola, & D. H. Rakison (Eds.), Infant perception and cognition: Recent advances, emerging theories, and future directions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Casasola, M. (2008). The development of infants’ spatial categories. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17, 21-25. 

Bhagwat, J. & Casasola, M. (2008). Early semantic development. To appear in M. Haith and J. Benson (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Infant and Early Childhood Development. Elsevier Press.

Casasola, M., & Bhagwat, J. (2007). Does a novel word facilitate 18-month-olds’ categorization of a spatial relation? Child Development, 78, 1818-1829.

Wilbourn, M. P., & Casasola, M. (2007). Discriminating signs: Perceptual precursors to acquiring a visual-gestural language. Infant Behavior and Development, 30, 153-160.

Casasola, M., Wilbourn, M. P., & Yang, S. (2006). Can English-learning toddlers acquire and generalize a novel spatial word? First Language, 26, 187-205.

Casasola, M., Bhagwat, J., & Ferguson, K. (2006). Precursors to verb learning: Infants' understanding of motion events. In K. Hirsh-Pasek, & R. M. Golinkoff (Eds.), Action meets word: How children learn verbs (pp. 160-190). Oxford University Press.

Kedar, Y., Casasola, M., & Lust, B. (2006). Getting there faster: 18- and 24-month-olds infants’ use of function words to determine reference. Child Development, 77, 325-338.

Casasola, M. (2005). When less is more: How infants learn to form an abstract categorical representation of support. Child Development, 76, 279-290.

Casasola, M. (2005). Can language do the driving? The effect of linguistic input on infants' categorization of support spatial relations. Developmental Psychology, 41, 183-192.
 
Casasola, M., & Wilbourn, M.P. (2004). Fourteen-month-old infants form novel word-spatial relation associations. Infancy, 6, 385-396.

Casasola, M., Cohen, L.B., & Chiarello, E. (2003). Six-month-old infants' categorization of containment spatial relations. Child Development, 74, 679-693.
 
Casasola, M., & Cohen, L. B. (2002). Infant categorization of containment, support, and tight-fit spatial relationships. Developmental Science, 5, 247-264.
 
Casasola, M. (2002). Exploring the relationship between language-specific semantic spatial categories and infants' nonlinguistic spatial categories. In E. Clark (Ed.), Proceedings of the Thirty-first Stanford Child Language Research Forum (p 1-10): CSLI Publications.
 
Casasola, M. & Cohen, L. B. (2000). Infants' association of language labels with causal actions. Developmental Psychology, 36, 155-168.
 
Werker, J. F., Cohen, L. B., Lloyd, V. L, Casasola, M., & Stager, C. L. (1998). Acquisition of word-object associations by 14-month-old infants. Developmental Psychology, 34, 1289-1309.
 
Cohen, L. B., Amsel, G., Redford, M. A., & Casasola, M. (1998). The development of infant causal perception. In A. Slater (Ed.), Perceptual, visual, auditory, and speech development: Perception in infancy. England: University College London Press and Taylor and Francis.