All posts by Woon Fei Ting

Reporting Bias: Speech input from parents & Lang outcomes

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In July 2020, our lab director, Asst Prof Suzy Styles and Research Associate Eshwaaree presented at the virtual conference organized by the International Congress of Infant Studies (ICIS 2020). They presented a systematic review on parent-child speech and early language development outcomes.

Substantial literature investigating the relationship between a child’s language development and the speech they hear from their caregivers has been published over the years. In the 1990s, Hart and Risley published an influential study investigating parental speech inputs and predictions on later language outcomes – popularising the idea of a “30 million word gap” between children who received less speech input from their parents compared to their peers.

Since then, many studies have further explored this relationship – higher quantity and quality of speech heard in the early years is associated with more proficient language skills. However, in correlational designs like this, there are always other possible causal pathways as shown in the graphic:

Pathway A – the quantity/quality of parent talk influences child language outcomes (e.g., talking more helps a baby develop language skills);

Pathway B – endogenous child language skills influence the quantity/quality of caregiver talk (e.g., a chatty child elicits more speech);

Pathway C – external factors influence both parent talk and child language development independently (e.g., environmental factors such as poverty-induced stress).

A systematic review of peer reviewed journal articles from 1977 to 2018 was conducted to examine the prevalence of interpretation bias for these three possible pathways. We found that most studies report Pathway A and a notably low number of articles were found to mention other causal pathways. This finding demonstrates that reporting habits in this field are biased towards the interpretation that ‘speaking more to a baby will enhance their language development’. This interpretive bias has potential implications for parents, educators and policy makers, as scarce resources may be invested in interventions targeting one causal pathway (e.g., talking more to babies), while others are overlooked (e.g., alleviating poverty in families most at risk).

This finding demonstrates that reporting habits in this field are biased towards the interpretation that ‘speaking more to a baby will enhance their language development’.

Findings from our systematic review revealed this reporting bias and has led us to come up with a novel intervention study – Talk Together Study.  We want to find out more about the pathways linking parent-child talk to child language outcomes and the efficacy of a “talk-boosting intervention”.

Click here to find out more and click here if you’re a parent of a child 8-36 months old and interested to sign up!

Photo by Chevanon Photography from Pexels

Multilingual Memories: Immersion as the best way to learn

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People go on exchange for a variety of reasons; for independence, travelling, to learn under a different country’s education system. For me, one of the biggest motivating factors was to hone my language skills. 

I had only just started learning French in university for two semesters, but I loved studying it and knew that I could not miss the opportunity to immerse myself in a naturalistic environment where the language would be spoken by native speakers all the time. 

The most unexpected way I experienced the effectiveness of this language learning method was when I took on a babysitting/tutoring job with a French family. I looked after two charming boys and two precious girls aged 3-10 and taught them English weekly. There was one major complication though: the children spoke close to no English! 

Being forced to use only French in order to be understood was a challenge that pushed the limits of my language skills. I had to quickly become familiar with the vocabulary for the children’s daily activities, especially in giving commands to keep them safe! We held surprisingly long conversations together in spite of my halting attempts, the children teaching me the words I didn’t know in French while I shared the English word in return. 

 

This piece was written by our #SGUnited intern, Mebelle. Mebelle is a fourth-year Linguistics major.

Photo by Jess Vide from Pexels

Multilingual Memories: Learning by exposure

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Growing up, I was exposed to English, Mandarin and a few Chinese dialects. According to my mother, when I was about 2 years old, she told my grandmother in Hainanese that she was leaving the house and to their surprise, I brought my shoes to the door and assumed that I would be leaving too! They were amazed that I could understand Hainanese despite not being deliberately taught it.  

Till today, I can still understand the Hainanese conversations my mother has with my grandparents and relatives, although I cannot speak it. I guess you can call it receptive multilingualism, which is a term I had learnt recently! Similarly, as my parents also speak Hokkien, I have picked up some Hokkien phrases here and there and am able to understand most of their Hokkien conversations as well.   

Something amusing I remember too, about my childhood was memorizing (without understanding) and singing along to theme songs of Hong Kong and Korean dramas I would watch with my family. One particular theme song I remember singing to was the Korean drama 大长今(Dae Jang Geum). You can give it a listen if you have not already! Fun fact is that it is actually written in Old Korean, the first documented stage of the Korean language. I think it amuses me how I was able to memorize these songs in a foreign language effortlessly as a child, which is something I find harder to do at this age. 

I have always found languages and the process of acquiring one to be pretty interesting. Before you acquire that particular language, the written and spoken form does not seem to make sense. But once you begin the process of acquiring one, be it reading or speaking, it feels like you have unlocked a secret code or opened a door in your brain and somehow what you read and hear now seem to make so much sense! Fascinating, isn’t it?  

 

This piece was written by Jairia Lim, our #SGUnited Intern. Jairia is a fourth-year Linguistics student.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

Multilingual Memories: Language-learning as an interest

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For the most part of my life, language-learning has been more rooted in as an academic obligation rather than borne out of personal passion and interest. While the studying of mother tongue languages have been implemented in the local education system to strengthen our connections to our ancestral origins and deepen understanding of our cultures so that we may embrace them – academic pressure may create a counter effect and cause students to dislike learning their mother tongues. 

Personally, back when I was younger, I did not see much value or purpose in learning Chinese given that my first language is English – my main medium of communication with friends and family. Additionally, I felt like Chinese was difficult to learn, which made me dread Chinese class all the time. I am sure that many others can relate to this. Till this day, I still remember my classmates and I dragging our feet to Chinese class and complaining about why we had to learn Chinese! In fact, I was really looking forward to never having to speak or write Chinese again since I was to be exempted from taking Chinese as a subject in Junior College. 

When I entered university, we were given the opportunity to take foreign language courses as our elective modules and it was then that I truly discovered the joy of learning a new language. Throughout my three years in university, I have taken Spanish, Thai and Korean as language electives and each module was a unique experience where I got to explore the different intricacies of each language. Isn’t it a profound and satisfying experience to see words that seem like meaningless symbols at the start suddenly make sense to you and become associated with various meanings and ideas? Undoubtedly, it is also fascinating to see how certain languages have overlaps between each other, a reflection of how various cultures have influenced each other.  

Thinking back to those days, maybe I would have enjoyed Chinese class a little more if I had taken the time to appreciate the intricacies of the language, instead of viewing it as a mere academic obligation to be fulfilled in a paper chase.  

This piece was written by our #SGUnited intern, Hannah Lin. Hannah is a fourth-year psychology student.

Photo credit: Adrianna Calvo on Pexels

Multilingual Memories: Daily conversations with my grandparents

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Photo: Annabel and Grandpa

Looking back on my childhood, I realized that I gained proficiency in English and Mandarin not through constant drilling and memorization of phrases and words from school worksheets. Instead, my parents provided me with constant exposure and opportunities for interaction with the other caregivers which created for me a rich language environment.  

I was very fortunate to have my grandparents around me when I was growing up, and it was not till later when I realized they had played an important role in how I acquired English and Mandarin Chinese.  

While both of my parents were busy working, it was my paternal grandfather, otherwise known as 爷爷 (ye ye), who would pick me up from kindergarten and primary school daily, and we would take the bus home together. Looking at the buildings and scenery on the way home, we would naturally converse in Mandarin as I told him about my day. When I reached home, it would be my paternal grandmother, whom I call嫲嫲 (ma ma), who would help me with my English homework and spelling, making sure that I would score well in my spelling test the next day. She had been educated in English. During the weekends, I would go over to Tiong Bahru and spend the evenings with my maternal grandmother whom I remember fondly as麻嫲 (ma ma), as we would converse in Mandarin while watching her favourite Taiwanese dramas such as 《爱》 and 《夜市人生》 together.    

It was through daily interactions with my grandparents that I managed to become proficient in both languages at a young age, and I am very grateful to have them around. Having two grandparents who speak Mandarin and a grandmother who speaks English has enabled me to learn both languages simultaneously as I constantly had to switch between languages when conversing with them.  Although I now take the bus home from school on my own, no longer need help in with my homework and have switched to watching Netflix and Youtube videos – sometimes, I find myself reminiscing about those days. They will forever remain as simple but beautiful memories.  

To me, the best way to learn a language is through experiencing it in your daily lives, with your family and loved ones.  

This piece was written by our #SGUnited Intern, Annabel Loh. Annabel is a fourth-year Chinese major.

Relooking at the critical age for second language learning

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You’ve probably heard that children learn a second language more easily than adults before they reach a certain age. This particular age range is often referred to as the critical period of language acquisition and typically for second language learning, the age cut-off is around the onset of puberty. After this period, learning a second language is said to be harder. There are various reasons as to why younger children have advantages over adults for second language learning including, brain plasticity; a lack of interference from a well-learnt first language; and a stronger desire to speak the same language as their peers. However, a recent study involving more than 680, 000 participants suggests that the critical period may be up to 17-18 years of age. 

A recent study…

In 2018, Hartshorne, Tenenbaum, and Pinker conducted a large-scale online study with English speakers. They launched an online quiz called “Games with Words” where participants had to guess if the English sentences presented were grammatically correct. 

They wanted to find out the relationship between language proficiency and language ability. Participants were asked their age and how long they had been learning English, what setting did the learning take place in, and if they had they moved to an English-speaking country. Their study attracted over 680,000 people all over the world, and their responses were analysed based on whether they were:

  • Monolinguals who grew up speaking in English only
  • Immersion learners who either learned English simultaneously with another language since they were really young, or learned it later at an English-dominant setting
  • Non-immersion learners who learnt English but spent most of their life after learning, in a non-English speaking country

What did they find?

People do have an advantage for grammar learning when they start early, but people are still good at learning grammar until they reach 17 years old—that’s ten years older than what the typical critical window suggests! Adult learners can still be proficient but not flawlessly fluent, say the researchers. But why does the critical window stop at age 17-18? The researchers think that the causes may be both biological and social. Beyond 17 years of age, most people move away from home, or start college or work, and may not have time to practice or learn a second language. Their results suggest that language immersion helps learners learn better than formal classroom teaching.  Lead researcher, Joshua Hartshorne commented, “People who had English classes but had never been to an English-speaking country maxed out (in terms of grammar scores in the quiz) at a much lower level than someone who has had a few years of immersion.”

Language immersion helps learners learn better than formal classroom teaching.

So what does this all mean?

Starting early may still be important in learning languages, but so is getting more exposure and practice earlier on. Parents can provide an immersive second language learning environment by engaging their children in casual conversations, books, movies, songs, YouTube videos etc. Language learning is dynamic and should not be limited to the classroom.

Grandparents, neighbours, relatives, teachers, and friends can all be engaged to create this immersive language learning environment!

For example, a trip to the playground with Ah Gong and Ah Ma can involve learning new Mandarin words to describe things in the neighbourhood. Weekend at Nenek’s house may be a great opportunity for your child to learn how to cook her special lodeh along with all the names of all the ingredients in Malay. Doing grocery shopping with Patti will give your child a chance to learn food terms in Tamil. 

Encouraging the use of languages inside the home (e.g. with family) or outside (e.g. with friends) also helps with language learning.

This post was written by our lab member Shaza, and edited by Fei Ting. Shaza watches a lot of anime in hopes of improving her Japanese, while Fei Ting’s TV dramas helped her to learn Korean. What are the other different ways you do to improve your language skills?

 

 

References:

Hartshorne, J. K., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Pinker, S. (2018). A critical period for second language acquisition: Evidence from 2/3 million English speakers. Cognition, 177, 263-277.

BOLD: Window for second language learning may remain open for longer

Helping your child understand the coronavirus pandemic

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It is normal to experience anxiety,  but during this time of uncertainty and panic surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, anxiety can increase greatly. For our children and teens, a lack of understanding regarding the situation may add to the frustration, anxiety, and worry that they are experiencing. 

It is a difficult period for them; they can no longer see their friends and or visit their grandparents, playgrounds are now out-of-bounds, and for the older ones, their school schedules have changed entirely. Adding to this is the constant stream of news regarding the virus and as parents (educators or caregivers), we can help ease their anxiety by explaining the situation to them in an age-appropriate way. 

Instead of dismissing their concerns or frustrations, we can engage them in a simple matter-of-fact way. Explain the situation to them after you’ve gathered information from trusted news outlets – currently, Singapore has over 2000 cases with most being linked to known clusters. Then, ask them about how they are feeling and what they think about the situation. Let them know that it is alright to feel frightened or anxious and assure them that this too will pass. 

Instead of dismissing their concerns or frustrations, we can engage them in a simple matter-of-fact way.

Illustrator Axel Scheffler, has teamed up with publishing house, Nosy Crow, to publish a free children’s book about the novel coronavirus. The team at Nosy Crow sought expert input from Professor Graham Medley of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, two head teachers and a child psychologist. The book provides answers to questions like “What is the Coronavirus?”, “Why are some places we normally go to closed?”.

We can also support our older children with Home-based Learning by providing them with the necessary space and privacy. Establishing morning routines like having breakfast, showering and changing into a fresh set of clothes, and daily morning check-ins will help them mentally set apart time and space boundaries for work vs. play. (These tips also work for adults!) 

When children feel a sense of control over their situations, their anxiety and stress levels will decrease. We can help them establish a sense of control over their daily routines and adjust to this “new normal”. This can also be a great time to introduce your children to your work and work routine! 

Keep safe! 

Link for parents
Ministry of Health (Singapore): Updates on COVID-19

 

This blog post was written by our lab manager and resident “aunty” to many kids, Fei Ting.

Image credits: Prawny, Pixabay.com, CC0 1.0

Happy World Book Day!

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On April 23, we will be celebrating World Book Day! For us adults, there are many benefits that regular reading can bring about – including mental stimulation, stress reduction, and improved analytical skills! But what about very young children? Should we also be engaging them with books? 

The answer is yes! 

When we read with our children, not only do we get special bonding time together, we are also helping them develop language and listening skills. The first three years of a child’s life is critical for language development and they should be experiencing language-rich interactions often!  

By engaging in language-rich interactions, young children develop:

  • Recognition of sounds (and letters when they get older)
  • Wider vocabulary size
  • Increased listening skills 
  • Stimulation of imagination 
  • Stimulation of their memory 

Book reading is definitely a wonderful language-rich interaction! 

But what if my child is too young to understand? 

It’s alright if your child is too young to recognise letters and words. You can introduce pictures on the books and use storybooks as a tool for a language-rich interaction! In fact, at our lab, we provide wordless picture books to parents for storybook reading sessions (as part of our experiment set-up) because wordless picture books allow parents to freely expand on what they would like to convey to their child and use whichever language(s) they like! 

Introducing books to your young child (0-3 years) will also provide sensory stimulation to them as they feel the textures of different books. Flipping pages of books is also a good way to stimulate fine motor skills. 

For children above 3, storybooks allow children to encounter situations outside of what they usually come across in everyday life (e.g. teasing, bullying), and caregivers reading with them can help them think about how to manage those situations. 

Can I use flashcards instead? 

There is no concrete evidence that the use of flashcards helps children learn more words than other language activities like book reading. Some children may find flashcards fun and if your child does, it is just an additional tool you have to engage your child in language-rich interaction. 

Are you a parent? Perhaps you might be interested in our wordless picture book? Or maybe you’re someone interested in the Science of Learning? Here at BLIP lab, we are researching various factors behind the Science of Learning – including what children are hearing in their environments. Join us in our research!

 

This post was contributed by lab manager, Fei Ting.

Can people forget how to speak their second language?

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Sometimes, during a conversation, we find ourselves looking for a word in a particular language but it just won’t come up. Have we forgotten the word? Is it possible to entirely forget a language we’ve once learnt?

Second Language Acquisition generally means learning a second language that isn’t one’s first language, or a language that we learn or pick up (usually formally) as we grow older. In “Bridging the Gap between Second Language Acquisition Research and Memory Science: the Case of Foreign Language Attrition” by Mickan, McQueen and Lemhöfer (2019), Second Language Acquisition (SLA) involves the encoding of new words, consolidating, and committing them to long-term memory, and later retrieving them. 

In Singapore, most of us experience early second language acquisition in Singapore or even simultaneous second language acquisition (exposure to both languages at the same time). Some of us may pick up a second language (or third, or fourth!) later in life, usually in a classroom setting. Sometimes, this sort of learning is referred to as foreign language learning ad in their recent paper, Mickan et al explored reasons for forgetting words in foreign languages we’ve learnt. 

Foreign Language Attrition: forgetting words in that another language

Attrition happens when a previously mastered foreign language is forgotten. Some factors that affect the rate and/or severity of attrition are:

  1. How proficient the speaker was before attrition
  2. How old the speaker is when attrition happens
  3. How often the language is used and how often they are exposed to it
  4. How motivated the speaker is to maintain language usage

Previous research showed that attrition happens quickly yet gradually, leaving the speaker with the most basic vocabulary stored somewhere in the brain (Bahrick, 1984). How is this possible? Researchers suggested that this is because attrition is not a failure to remember, but more of a failure to retrieve. This means that instead of having forgotten that language entirely, the brain is now finding it more and more difficult to gain access to the previously learned language!

Attrition due to Interference between Languages

Rather than saying that attrition is a natural decaying process over time, experts suggest that retrieval triggers our languages to compete for resources in our brains. As bilinguals, we might find it easier to recall a word in the language that we are better at and do it often. Over time, we may be worse at recalling the word in our less dominant language. This phenomenon is called retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). In a study done by Anderson and colleagues (1994), participants were asked to study a number of combinations such as:

FRUIT-APPLE    FRUIT-BANANA    FURNITURE-CHAIR

Participants then practiced recalling selective combinations of category and item, e.g. FRUIT-APPLE but not FRUIT-BANANA, before they were tested on all the combinations they studied. The results showed that recall was best for category-item combinations that were practised, i.e. FRUIT-APPLE, and worst for combinations where categories were practised but its corresponding items were not, i.e. FRUIT-BANANA.

How does this apply to language use? When a speaker of two languages, e.g. an English-Malay speaker, wants to refer to a “cup”, both “cup” in English and “cawan” in Malay will be activated and compete to be chosen as the word to be used. According to the language interference theory, the more the speaker chooses to use “cup”, the more inhibited the recall for “cawan” will be, making it harder to access in the future. 

Is there a difference between words which sound similar versus words which sound completely different? For example, “table” in English and “tafel” in Dutch sound very similar, while the Malay examples I used sound very different. It is unclear, however, whether which type interferes more or less with each other. Sometimes, it might even seem like we may forget words in both languages! Maybe it’s just our brains trying to choose between the word we hear or use more often, instead of the language we use more often. What we do know is that being able to access both languages can be improved via active retrieval and usage of both languages. As they say, all is not lost!

At BLIP Lab, we’re working on some super exciting projects that explore Singapore’s colourful and unique language landscape, and how this might affect the language development of our young Singaporeans! For more information on our ongoing studies and how you can participate, click here! 

The original article:

Mickan, A., McQueen, J. M., & Lemhöfer, K. (2019). Bridging the gap between second language acquisition research and memory science: The case of foreign language attrition. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00397

 

This article was originally crafted by Shaza, with edits by Fei Ting

2019: A look back at BLIP Lab

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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!