About

This inaugural Smart Baby Seminar organised by the NTU will explore these questions.

Join Singapore’s top infant scientists for a fun and informative workshop about the latest findings in infant science, with plenty of tips and tricks about how you can best nurture your child’s development.

27th February 2016, Saturday 9am-12pm Lecture Theatre, Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine

Topics

Little Liars: Development of Verbal Deception in Children by Special Guest Speaker: Dr Kang Lee

The Sensory World of Babies by Dr Suzy Styles

Raising Bilingual Children: Common Concerns & Strategies for Success by Dr Leher Singh

Boost Language Skills with Effective Caregiver-Child Interactions by Dr Luca Onnis

Speakers

Guest of Honour: Prof Alan Chan

Dean, College of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences

Chairpersons

Dr Gianluca Esposito, PhD

Dr Esposito is a Developmental Clinical Psychologist in Psychology at NTU, and the University of Trento, Italy. He is currently doing investigations on child psychopathology contributing strengths in human neuroimaging. His specific focus is on how baby’s brain develops and how this development is mediated by genetic, environmental and cultural factors. He is also the proud father to a 3 year-old girl and another baby on the way. To find out more about his work, click here.

Dr Pei Pei Setoh, PhD

Dr Setoh is a developmental psychologist investigating the development of social and moral cognition in young children at NTU. Her research focuses on early conceptual development in three core domains: biological, psychological, and sociomoral reasoning. Her specific focus is on infants’ and toddlers’ expectations about interactions within and between groups. She conducts studies in collaboration with Science Centre’s KidsSTOP. Find out more at www.sgbabylab.com!

Little Liars: Development of Verbal Deception in Children

By Special Guest Speaker - Dr Kang Lee , PhD

Lying is a common occurrence during our everyday interpersonal communication. People tell lies for different purposes. In this talk, I will focus on how children learn to tell lies to conceal their transgressions from a very young age, and whether and how various cognitive-social-contextual factors affect the development of lying. I will also discuss cognitive-social-neural mechanisms underlying such development. Dr Kang Lee is the University Distinguished Professor at the University of Toronto, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair. He is also a Researcher (Professor Rank) at the Center for Human Development and Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego. In addition, he is an adjunct professor of Beijing Normal University, Zhejiang Normal University, and Zhejiang Sci-Tech University. He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. Dr. Lee was an elected Council Member of the American Psychological Association, and the scientific director of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Psychological Association. Further, he served for ten years as an associate editor of Developmental Science, a leading international journal in the field of developmental psychology. To find out more about his work, click here.

The Sensory World of Babies

by Dr Suzy Styles, D.Phil

How do babies make sense of their world? Even before birth, babies are enveloped in a stream of sounds and sensations. How does the emerging mind make sense of this ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’? How do they discover the sounds of human speech, and when are they able make use of them? This talk will follow the learning baby’s journey into language-specific-listening, with information about what stimulates babies’ sensory systems, and what you can do to help your child discover the world of language. Dr Styles is a developmental psychologist and linguist, investigating sensory systems of language in Psychology at NTU. With training in the Psychology of Infant Language, Asian Studies and Historical Linguistics, Suzy joined NTU from Australia, the long way around – via Sendai (Japan), and the Oxford (UK). She received her doctorate from the University of Oxford, and worked in the Oxford University BabyLab for some years. When not in the lab, Suzy is a keen cloud-watcher, and photographer.

Raising Bilingual Children: Common Concerns and Strategies for Success

by Dr Leher Singh, PhD

How does learning two languages affect your child and what can you do to support your child’s bilingual journey? I will talk about how children’s early development is affected by becoming bilingual. As a parent of a multilingual child, what should you expect in terms of your child’s language and cognitive development? What are important considerations for parents when raising multilingual children? How can parents best support bilingualism in the home environment and in making school choices? Drawing from research, I will discuss these questions and address some common developmental concerns raised by parents of bilingual children. Dr. Singh is a developmental psychologist at the National University of Singapore. She directs the NUS Infant and Child Language Laboratory where her team conducts research on early child language development and bilingualism. Her research focuses specifically on factors that help children acquire languages and on the effects of bilingualism on the developing mind.

Boost Language Skills with Effective Caregiver-Child Interactions

by Dr Luca Onnis, PhD

The first years of a child’s life mark a crucial phase of rapid growth in language and communication. Infants and children make impressive strides in learning their own language and their ability to do so predicts later cognitive and intellectual growth. For example, toddlers’ facility with language at age three is a good predictor of how well they perform in school at ages nine or ten. What determines who’s faster or better at language early on? Here I focus on the role of caregiver-child interaction, and show that specific ways of speaking to the child may hinder or boost language development. I offer cost-free practical tips that parents and caregivers can apply daily when interacting with their child. Dr Onnis received his PhD in Psychology in 2004 from the University of Warwick. He was later a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell University from 2004 to 2008. He was Assistant and then Associate professor at the University of Hawaii from 2008 to 2013. Joining the Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies at NTU in late 2013, he founded the LEAP lab. His research focuses on understanding basic mechanisms of language learning in both children and adults. A proud uncle to niece Greta, he occasionally moonlights as a babysitter.

We invite you to become our research partners, as we discover more about the development of babies’ language, learning, and sensory systems. Your daily experiences and observations can make an important contribution to what we know about early childhood development in Singapore.

To do the best research we need the support of the community we serve. If parents help us to make new and more important discoveries, we can share them with the Singaporean community, and help future generations to make the most of their formative years.

Join our contact list so we can …
* Tell you about upcoming opportunities to share your parenting experience
* Invite your baby to participate in fun and informative research
* Tell you about about upcoming research sharing events

We won’t share your information with any third parties, only with our research team.

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Smart Baby Seminar

is co-sponsored by the

Centre of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

and jointly organised by

the Division of Psychology and Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies