I am a language scientist, and I investigate how babies discover the sensory structure of the languages they hear around them, and how this translates into language learning. I started the Brain, Language and Intersensory Perception Lab (BLIP Lab) at NTU in Singapore so we could find out more about how this happens for kids hearing multiple languages at the same time.

Here in Singapore, it is completely normal to grow up multilingual, and to speak different languages throughout your life. In our lab, we look at the way different families use their different languages when they speak with their babies, and how this influences language development. It’s a fantastic opportunity to investigate the emergence of multilingualism in a context where it’s the norm!

Starting today, for the International Day of Multilingualism we’ll be sharing lots of stories about multilingualism in Singapore – what it’s like to grow up in such a multilingual place, how different people feel about their different languages, and some of the core research questions we are working on as a team.

I hope you’ll join us  in our discoveries!

Dr Suzy J Styles is Director of the BLIP Lab

We are proud to announce that the NRF has funded our newest project ‘How do language mixes contribute to the development of effective bilingualism and biliteracy in Singapore,’ for a 5-year-long programme of research. We will be working with families in Singapore to find out more about how parents communicate with their children in their different languages, what this means for the way that children’s sensory systems develop, and how this sets them up to be strong readers in the early school years.

We are hiring: 2 Post-docs, 2 Research associates, 4 Research assistants, and a partridge in a pear tree (just kidding about that last one!). The job details are right here.

BLIP Lab is pleased to announce its involvement in collaborative research with the GUSTO Project, Singapore’s most comprehensive longitudinal birth cohort.  Six years ago, the project called ‘Growing Up in Singapore Towards healthy Outcomes (GUSTO) was launched to investigate links between maternal health during pregnancy, and babies’ outcomes. Now the children are all heading towards their sixth birthday, and the investigations continue. BLIP Lab’s work with the GUSTO team is investigating some of the relationships between different languages that children hear at home.

As part of our collaboration, we have also launched an investigation into how children in the GUSTO group link up the sounds of words to their possible meanings, using a fun game called Alien Zoo. In this game, children are visiting the Alien Zoo, when all of the friendly creatures have escaped, and become mixed up. Their job is to help the zookeepers sort  out which aliens are which, by guessing which ones make which noise, or have which name. This study will help us to understand how connections between the senses develop in children, and how these connections might relate to other skills that children will need in school.

If you would like to know more – or perhaps even try out the game yourself, you can find out more about it here, or via our GAMES page

Researchers at Royal Holloway recently made the news by sharing a video of fMRI captured while someone sang along to an Adele song in the scanner.

The video is fantastic (follow the link above to watch). It shows how the mouth moves in order to produce different kinds of sounds. If you’re anything like we are, you’ll find yourself watching it endlessly.

We made a gif to help you know what to look out for while you are watching!

In July, BLIP Lab attended a conference all about Vision – The Asia Pacific Conference on Vision. BLIP Lab PhD student Shang Nan presented a poster outlining her latest work on links between hearing and vision for people with different experience speaking the Chinese language (abstract). Asst Prof Suzy Styles gave a presentation about how people connect different kinds of visual shapes to the ‘voices’ of different instruments, and an invited talk about how different streams of evidence suggest that language development not only shapes auditory perception of the language itself, but also influences linkages between sight and sound. You can read the abstracts using the links below:

Shang N & Styles SJ (2015) ‘Language background changes audio-visual mapping of shapes-to-sounds,’ Poster presented at the Asia Pacific Conference on Vision, July 2015, Singapore.

Styles SJ (2015) ‘Giving shape to the voices of instruments: Audio-visual correspondences between spatial and temporal frequencies,’ Asia Pacific Conference on Vision, July 2015, Singapore.

Styles SJ (2015), ‘Perceptual tuning and its multisensory outcomes: Language adaptation influences crossmodal processing,’ Asia Pacific Conference on Vision, July 2015, Singapore.