Season greetings everyone! 

As we look back on the year that is coming to an end, we would like to thank all our mummies and daddies and the little ones, citizen scientists and collaborators! 

This year we began the first phase of our Baby Talk-A-Thon which will help us to understand more about the languages heard by little ones growing up in Singapore. 

We conducted a series of recordings of how parents talking to their babies when playing with books and picture cards. We have begun discovering all sorts of interesting details about how parents switch between their languages to make the interaction more fun for their babies. The language mixes unique in each household may contribute unique individual differences in language outcomes of Singaporean children! 

The Baby Talk-A-Thon will continue in the New Year – We will be contacting parents of children from 3 months to 3 years to invite 500 families to take part. Participating families will receive an individualized talk-report to help parents understand more about their child’s experiences with language. The talk-report details estimates of the number of turns taken by the parent and child, the number of adult words, and the number of child vocalisations. 

This year we also developed new materials and tools that will help us to understand how language begins emerging for children growing up in Singapore. These tools include context-appropriate vocabulary checklists of all four main languages – a measure of vocabulary size of children under 3. 

We also looked into special Red-Dot Baby-Talk words like mam-mam and shee-shee, which are some of the first words kids in Singapore learn to recognise. It is important for us to document and understand these Red-Dot words if we want to paint a fuller picture of a Singaporean child’s vocabulary.

Watch out on our Facebook for the launch of the first-ever study of these words in Singapore! We are asking people all over Singapore to help us understand how these words are used and when they are learned.

BLIP Lab has also presented our research at a number of different conferences: 

Wai Tung shared her systematic review of language interventions at the University of Oxford. 

Fei Ting presented on new approaches to characterising multilingual infants at the British Psychological Society Cognitive Developmental Joint Conference in the UK. 

Various lab members also shared their work at the International Symposium of Cognitive Neuroscience held at NTU.

We also hosted meetings with our international collaborators in our new home – the Lifespan Research Centre in the LKC Medical School at Novena. 

In the coming 2020, we look forward to beginning our neuroscience studies involving EEG and eye-tracking, continuing with Baby Talk-a-Thon & Red-Dot Baby-Talk, and pursuing the promotion of Open, Replicable science. 

We look forward to having you involved in our upcoming investigations! Join us here!