Happy holidays everyone!
As we wrap up the year 2021, we’d like to thank all our mummies, daddies, and little ones, as well as citizen scientists, and collaborators! It’s been another busy and challenging year, but your tremendous support has kept us going.
We wrapped up the data collection for our large home-based online study – Talk Together Study at the start of this year—hooray! Close to 150 Singaporean families participated in our Talk Together Study, and we’ve managed to record over 400 parent-child interactions. During the study, we conducted a series of video recordings of how parents spoke with their babies when interacting with wordless picture books and picture cards over virtual video call sessions. We have begun discovering all sorts of interesting details about how parents switch between their languages to make the interaction more fun for the little ones. The language mixes unique in each household may contribute towards individual differences in language outcomes of Singaporean children.
Screengrab of parent and child during one of our video calls
To show our gratitude towards our Talk Together families, we’ve also had two rounds of Lucky Draws where winners receive a bunch of BLIP lab goodies, including a multilingual children’s storybook, BLIP face masks, a waterproof BLIP tote bag, and NTUC FairPrice vouchers. Parents sent us photos of the little ones enjoying their gifts and they were so cute we had to post them on our Facebook page (with their permission of course!) We were also delighted to hear about their positive experiences during the Talk Together study.
One of our lucky families sporting matching BLIP face masks from the Lucky Draw!
This year, we took part in several conferences and published papers on the research that we do at the lab. The BLIP Talk Together team presented 6 posters about the Talk Together study at the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) biennial meeting in March. Our lab manager, Fei Ting, and research fellow, Han also presented their research on bilingualism and language development at the same conference where they received the ‘Best Reflects International Research’ award for their individual presentations! Additionally, one of our research fellows, Tuan Anh, presented at the Bilingualism Matters Research Symposium (BMRS 2021) on BELA, a processing pathway for multilingual parent-child conversations, and our PhD candidates, Lei and Hannah, presented their research at the Bilingualism Matters Research Symposium 2021 and the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Cogsci 2021) respectively.
Lei has also published a preprint of her study on early linguistic experience and how it may shape bilingual adults’ hearing for phonemes in English and Mandarin Chinese: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/qvsu3
To add on to these accomplishments, we published a methods paper on the methods we used in our Talk Together study, as well as what we learned from conducting this Randomized Control Trial completely virtually. We’re excited to have it published on Frontiers Psychology where we hope it can provide some insight into ways researchers can conduct studies of a similar nature. Read the summary of our report here: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/talktogether-methods-reporting/
As COVID-19 restrictions continue to affect the way we conduct our studies, BLIP lab has had to continue exploring new ways to collect naturalistic parent-child speech interactions. We’re excited to announce that sign-ups are open for our Baby Talk-a-thon next year!
The Baby Talk-a-thon aims to document the languages that children hear in their homes. We want to investigate how language exposure contributes to the way children develop language. 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 a baby’s daily talk comes from which of the household’s languages, and the language mixes differ between different homes.
If you are a parent with a child between 0-4 years old, join us in this study as Citizen Scientists: https://ntuhss.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_868i1NIkpvf00QK
This year, 10 #SGunited interns joined us at BLIP lab during the summer working on transcription, and data preparations and analyses! Currently we have a team of almost 40 part-time student assistants who are transcribing the parent-child interactions we’ve recorded during the Talk Together Study.
We’re also happy to welcome two full-time BLIP research assistants, Annabel and Vinitha, who are working on the language mixes project!
Here are some articles we’ve posted this year about language and child development that you may find useful or interesting:
Pop Songs: A Tool for Language Learning
https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/pop-songs-a-tool-for-language-learning/
Switching between languages is OK!
https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/switching-between-languages-is-ok/
To baby-talk or not to baby-talk?
https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/to-baby-talk-or-not-to-baby-talk/
Digitalized learning for language acquisition in children
https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/digitalized-learning-for-language-acquisition-in-children/
Children Use Both Brain Hemispheres to Process Spoken Sentences, Unlike Adults
How does storytelling help build resilience in children?
https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/how-does-storytelling-help-build-resilience-in-children/
Can a word sound round or spiky?
https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/can-a-word-sound-round-or-spiky/
Does exposure to multiple languages influence Singapore children’s learning of English?
Multilingual Memories
https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/tag/multilingual-memories/
Here at BLIP lab, we’re most excited to have you join us for another year in investigating the language development in Singaporean children. Follow our Facebook page for updates about our ongoing studies and to get notified as we share interesting, bite-sized information about language and child development on our blog.
Happy New Year and Happy Holidays! BLIP lab wishes you and your family a safe and joyful weekend ahead 🎉