Join us for a fun investigation of the speech that Singaporean babies hear in their day-to-day lives!

Around the world, language scientists are discovering that the kind of speech babies hear in their first 3 years makes a big contribution to early language  development and how well kids do in school later on. However, at the moment, almost all of the information we have comes from one country (the USA) and one language (English). We want to know what the speech environment is like for Singaporean babies.

Singapore’s language landscape is very interesting, with lots of different languages, and lots of different language combinations in different families. This is a globally unique situation, which means that findings from other parts of the world might not apply directly here. The talk-a-thon will help us discover more about Singapore, and what strategies are the most helpful for Singaporean families. Your involvement can help us make these discoveries.

We will send a special talk recorder to capture the speech that your child hears over the course of a day. This will help us to understand much of baby’s daily talk comes from which of the household’s languages, and the language mixes differ between different homes.

At this stage, we are recruiting families who would like to take part in our Talk-a-Thon! If you would like to find out more about it, or to join us in our investigations, you can fill in this form.

This project is in collaboration with the Science of Learning Institute at Johns Hopkins University, funded by CRADLE@NTU, and the National Research Foundation.