Kennedy Casey (she/her/hers)

About me

I am the current lab manager. I joined the chatter lab in summer 2021 after completing my BA degree at Princeton University, where I concentrated in Psychology and also studied Cognitive Science, Linguistics, and Neuroscience. During undergrad, I worked primarily with Dr. Casey Lew-Williams, and my thesis research combined eye-tracking and corpus-based observational methods to investigate how infants learn and represent some of their earliest words. I am excited to continue using multi-method—and particularly naturalistic—approaches to better understand the richness and diversity of children’s early language environments. Broadly, my ongoing research focuses on how young learners extract meaningful information from complex, everyday communicative contexts and explores which cues (linguistic, environmental, social, etc.) may support them most in doing so.

CV

Publications & selected preprints

Casey, K., Potter, C. E., Lew-Williams, C., & Wojcik, E. H. (in revision). Moving beyond “nouns in the lab”: Using naturalistic data to understand why infants’ first words include uh-oh and hi. [ms] [osf]

Baek, S., Marques, S., Casey, K., Testerman, M., McGill, F., & Emberson, L. (2023). Attrition rate in infant fNIRS research: A meta-analysis. Infancy, 28(3), 507-531. [ms] [gh]

Casey, K., & Casillas, M. (2022). From doggy to dog: Developmental shifts in children’s use of register-specific words. In J. Culbertson, A. Perfors, H. Rabagliati & V. Ramenzoni (Eds.), Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2022) (pp. 49-56). [ms] [gh]

Casey, K., Elliott, M., Mickiewicz, E., Silva Mandujano, A., Shorter, K., Duquette, M., Bergelson, E., & Casillas, M. (2022). Sticks, leaves, buckets, and bowls: Distributional patterns of children’s at-home object handling in two subsistence societies. In J. Culbertson, A. Perfors, H. Rabagliati & V. Ramenzoni (Eds.), Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2022) (pp. 927-933). [ms] [gh] [data visualization tool]

Casey, K., Novick, K., & Lourenco, S. F. (2021). Sixty years of gender representation in children’s books: Conditions associated with overrepresentation of male versus female protagonists. PLOS ONE, 16(12), e0260566. [ms] [osf]

Contact

Email: kbcasey@uchicago.edu