Source: (Weisleder, A., & Fernald, A., 2013)

According to the article titled ‘How do Little Kids Learn Language’ published in Frontiers for Young Minds, children learn languages differently because of differences in their environments. For example, some children have more books than others and that may have an implication on their vocabulary size (assuming that their caregivers read to them more). In our lab, we often hear from parents who are anxious about their children’s development milestones regarding language development. Language development is a challenging field of study.  Although some scientists disagree with one another on some theories, but they have a mutual understanding that language learning for a child takes time to build over a period of time.

One of the most commonly used methods for studying infants and toddlers is eye-tracking. The basis of an eye-tracking paradigm is that we look at something when we’re interested and look away when we’re bored. Studying the eye movements would assist scientists to understand what the child knows especially if they aren’t producing any words yet. To illustrate two images such as a ball and a cup are placed on a TV screen. The children are asked, “Do you see the ball?”. The speed and accuracy of the eye movement searching for the ball is measured by using a fancy eye-tracking camera. Our lab is currently designing some eye-tracking tasks for babies aged 0-6 months! 

Another method is to ask with parents to identify the list of vocabulary the children are familiar with. This method is usually used for children below the age of three. They are provided with a long list of words and asked to check them off. However, asking parents  to check off words may not be as effective as they may not be able to remember. In US and UK, these wordlists have been standardised and well-studied. Some parents and educators even use these lists to identify children at-risk for language disorders. In Singapore, these wordlists have yet to be standardised and norms are not yet established. Our lab is currently redesigning these wordlists to fit Singapore’s language landscape and will be asking for participants soon. Parents, you can sign up here if you are interested! Sometimes, researchers visit the homes of the children to investigate their language  environments. A well-known study is the ‘Thirty Million Word Gap’, by Betty Hart and Todd Risley. They visited 42 homes monthly, recorded what the children, from ages 9 months to 3 years, spoke and heard for an hour. It was found that children who had a larger vocabulary were more frequently spoken to by their parents. Another significant finding was that children who heard more words came from financially stable families. A scientific graph was plotted to predict the vocabulary size as the children grew to indicate the number of new words they had learnt over time. Children with larger vocabulary sizes when they were young continued to have this advantage as they grow. However, this is a problematic finding. According to other researchers, the 30 million word gap seems exaggerated and results have not been replicable. Furthermore, there were confounding factors like an ‘observer effect’ as the researcher (white females) observed low-income black families. In recent years, to remove the ‘observer effect’ and for more accuracy, researchers have turned to smart recorders like the LENA device. Even then, in a much larger study with 329 American families, the word gap found was only close to 4 million by the time a child turns 4. In a multilingual environment like Singapore, combinations of various languages are spoken. We do not yet know anything about language environments of Singaporean children. In our upcoming Baby Talk-a-Thon  study, we aim to recruit 500 families to do recordings of what their babies are hearing. The families will be handed the LENA device for non-invasive, fuss-free recording sessions. Interested to take part? Sign up here.

Read  the original article ‘How Do Little Kids Learn Language?’ at 

<https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2017.00045>

Hello everyone,
How are you feeling now?

How do we know what was meant in that question? Maybe it is just a way to start a conversation, or maybe I do care about your feelings, or both. How would you know what were meant?

We assume many things during communication which helps reduce our mental load. But if we leave things unexamined and only take them on the surface level, we may deem things trivial and overlook many interesting aspects of life. We have most likely never met before and you don’t know what my voice sounds like. Whose voice did you hear as you were reading this? Am I really talking to you? Here and now we are interacting in this conversation, with you answering my questions or challenging my thoughts. Where does this happen? Where are we in time? Is that my-now and your-past when I am writing this text or is it my-future and your-now when you are reading it? Who am I and who are you? Will these questions change how we see things?

These questions motivated me to become a semanticist to study meanings. I believe if we are aware of what our speech truly means, together with their effects, it will help to make our world a better place.

National Day falls on 9 August in Singapore and it is widely celebrated by all. National Day celebrations include the National Day Parade and with displays of fireworks across Singapore.

The national language of Singapore is Malay, and English is the official working language. As the national language of Singapore, Malay is the language of Singapore’s National Anthem and military parade ground commands. While the Malay language is also used in neighbouring countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia, language contact and evolution has led to differences in the vocabulary and grammar among speakers in these countries.

National Day embraces the various languages and cultures in Singapore with a plethora of events lined up to mark the country’s 54th birthday, and its bicentennial year. The Singapore government promotes bilingualism through the bilingual education policy and various public campaigns. Modern languages researchers agree that being bilingual  helps us to communicate and adds distinct advantages to the developing brain. Speaking in more than one language may also enable people to gain a more profound understanding of their own culture and increase their creativity.

Are you a Singaporean household with a young child? Or a Singaporean interested in the science of language development? We are currently looking for anyone interested to partner us as Citizen Scientists to help us learn more about the language spoken in Singaporean and what it takes to raise a bilingual/multilingual child in Singapore.

Click here to join our contact list.

                     Singapore at dusk (Source: Wikipedia)

Singapore became an independent nation in 1965 after more than 200 years of British colonial rule. A new hybrid language emerged since then which is known as ‘Singlish’ that is very distinct from standardised English taught in schools. Singlish is an English-based creole language spoken in Singapore. A creole language is a natural language which arose from contact of various languages. Some examples include French creoles e.g., Hatian Creole spoken in Haiti and Portuguese-based creoles e.g., Cape Verdean Creole spoken in the islands of Cabo Verde. Singlish has words borrowed from  Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese, Malay and Tamil. This is truly a reflection of multiculturalism.

Singlish has become the language of the street. It is used in many contexts, for example, when chatting with friends and families; when speaking to local taxi drivers; and ordering food at the hawker centre.Singaporeans are very comfortable with the use of Singlish although a different variety of English – standard Singapore English – is taught in schools. 

In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) announced that it has added 19 new “Singapore English” terms such as “ang moh”, “shiok”, “sabo” and subsequently “lah”, “sinseh”, and, “kiasu”!

.At the BLIP lab, we are interested in Singlish terms or local slang words that parents or caregivers use with their children e.g., makan or shee shee.We want to make sure that our checklist contains terms that Singaporeans use with their children. You can help us build our checklist by taking part in our Red-Dot Baby Talk study which will be launching shortly. The study is an online survey open to all Singaporeans.

Dr Alejandrina Cristia visited the LIFESPAN Research Centre on 6 August 2019 and shared with the BLIP team about her current research. Her talk was on “Big data on Small Children”. Dr Cristia is the Research Director of CNRS, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP) and Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), in Paris, France. 

Dr Cristia emphasised the fact that most of the research regarding language acquisition is conducted in the US and Europe and the subjects of these studies are largely English monolinguals. However, more than 60% of the world’s population is either bilingual or multilingual so she pointed out that more research needs to be carried out with children population in Asia and Africa in order for us to come to a better understanding of language acquisition. Part of Dr Cristia’s research includes recording speech heard by children and analysing the data  for the amount of child-directed speech vs adult-directed speech heard by the children. Past literature has informed us that child-directed speech, with its salient features like higher pitch, facilities language learning in children. She also examined the features of a language and the children’s language environments to find out what influences the learnability of the given language. 

Her methodology of conducting home recording of speech heard by children is similar to our current Baby Talk-a-thon project, and our BLIP team learned from her the challenges of conducting such recordings. We now feel better equipped for our upcoming home recordings with Singaporean families. 

At BLIP Lab, we are interested in finding out  more about language environments of Singaporean children. By participating in our home recordings, you and your child are partnering us as Citizen Scientists to build a corpus of Singaporean child-directed speech and to helping us to figure out what factors influence bilingual and biliteracy outcomes. 

We are looking for families with 0-36 months old to participate in our Baby Talk-a-thon!

Register your interest at http://bit.ly/LIFESPANbabylab

On 2 November 2018, Prof Suzy Styles was invited to present her research at the Science of Learning (SoL) symposium held at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. The event was organised by the Office of Education Research (OER), with support from the National Research Foundation (NRF). By looking into the Science of Learning (SoL), education practices can be shaped by the latest developments in psychology and neuroscience. The NRF supports research examining Singapore’s education methods in order to develop new methods which has better learning outcomes.

The theme of the symposium was “From Laboratories to Learning”. Neuroscientists and psychologists presented their latest work on brain development and function and how learning can be enhanced using what they’ve discovered. Prof Suzy Styles shared about the impact of early language exposure on bilingual and biliteracy outcomes of Singaporeans.The findings arose from a study the BLIP Lab and Dr Sagarika Bhattacharjee conducted last year. We recruited 228 undergraduates from Nanyang Technological University to complete the Language Fingerprint – a survey containing questions about one’s language proficiency, frequency of language use, and the percentage of talk their caregivers provided in each of their languages when they were young. The team then computed the Composite Language input Proportions (CLIPs) for each participant. Our preliminary findings suggest important links between the early years CLIPs, and adult proficiency in Mother Tongue language. To read more about this study and Prof Suzy Style’s talk, check out page 10 in the latest volume of the NIE OER Knowledge Bites

Currently, the BLIP lab team is working on our Baby Talk-a-thon project to understand Singaporean children’s language environments because we understand that retrospective data from adults (like the ones collected in our study) is insufficient in understanding what influences language outcomes. We plan to recruit 500 families in Singapore to take part.home recording sessions.

Find out more about our Baby Talk-a-thon project and register your interest here!