Last Saturday, we hosted Our Bilingual Futures event, which was a series of talks and a follow-up Q&A session on the science of raising bilingual children in a multilingual Singapore.

Our lab director, Associate Professor Dr Suzy Styles (NTU), started the event by explaining the shifting language environments of Singaporean households. According to the 2020 Census, there are more young families which indicate that English is the main language they use at home compared to ten years ago. The shift towards more English in the households means that children born to younger Singaporean parents are hearing more English as they grow up. However, the majority of Singaporean parents still use at least two languages with their child.

Dr Suzy Styles also shared the concept of translanguaging and explained that the fluid switching between languages done by Singaporean parents is not unusual or unnatural and that it is not detrimental to a child’s language development.

Dr Beth O’Brien (NIE) then took the stage to explain to parents why reading with young children is a great way to develop their language skills. She provided examples of how parents can create word games for their child to develop phonological awareness.

Finally, Professor Dr Annabel Chen (NTU) explained the neurological processes and brain areas involved when we are reading and how reading with children in various languages activates their brains and promotes language development.

Attendees also received goodie bags and had the opportunity to visit the labs’ booths located outside the auditorium where they learnt about our ongoing studies. We even had a spin-the-wheel game and a lucky draw! Check out these photos from our event:

We’d like to thank everyone for coming to our event! We hope you enjoyed the talks and found the sessions to be informative 🥰

If you were unable to attend the event, fret not! The talks are now available on our YouTube page (to activate English subtitles, activate the CC option):

Dr Suzy Styles: https://youtu.be/WVH8eY2WqHA 

Dr Beth O’Brien: https://youtu.be/bd4F3UHkROE

Prof Annabel Chen: https://youtu.be/MtEfDIxkDqc

Q&A session: https://youtu.be/gtDI5N58GNU

Transcripts of Q&A session: PART 1 | PART 2

Watch this space for updates or follow us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/bliplabntu 

Follow us on Instagram @bliplabntu!

If you would like to know more about what we do, you can visit https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby. 

We’re currently recruiting families with children between birth to 4 years old for our upcoming Baby Talk-a-thon!
If you’re keen to take part, you can register your interest here: https://ntusingapore.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_868i1NIkpvf00QK 

Our Bilingual Futures is a collaboration between BLIP Lab NTU, OER Centre for Research in Child Development NIE, and:

CRADLE: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/reading/

Clinical brain lab

Website: http://www.clinicalbrain.org/ 

Twitter: @cblntu

Telegram: https://t.me/clinicalbrainlab 

Learning brain lab

Website: https://www.learningbrain.org/ 

Instagram: @learningbrainlab

This event was funded in part by the National Research Foundation Science of Learning Grant awarded to Dr Suzy Styles.

Our lab director Dr Suzy Styles has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure – congratulations! We’re excited to share this news with all of you. Look forward to more exciting things happening at BLIP Lab! 🎉🎉🎉

Follow Dr Styles on Twitter: @suzyjstyles

This week, we’re introducing the current members of BLIP Lab, so watch out for our next post!

Like us on Facebook: bliplabntu
Follow us on Instagram: @bliplabntu

If a child were raised in an environment where they were exposed to many different languages, could such a child become omnilingual? Omnilinguals are people who can speak and/or understand all the different languages. While being bi- or multi-lingual is common in Singapore, would a child who is exposed to all the languages and its varieties here be able to pick up on all of them?

“Kids are motivated by watching others use their language together,” Dr. Styles said. “And they are generally motivated to use those languages that they see having the greatest social impact.”

Our lab director Dr Suzy Styles gives her insights on language acquisition in multilingual environments for the New York Times. In the article, she shares how the amount of exposure and whether the child is interested in learning particular languages are two important things we should consider. 

Read the full article here (5 mins): https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/science/children-languages-randall-munroe.html

Did you have a chouchou growing up?

Here in Singapore, words such as chouchou are some of babies’ first words and are part of what makes baby-talk in this part of the world special. Not much is known about when little kids learn these Red Dot words, and how they contribute to general language skills, but that’s why we’re interested to find out more! What are some other Red Dot words do you know and use in your day-to-day conversations? Did words such as mammam, pompom, and sayang come to mind? And at what age do Singaporean children know these words? Let us know on Facebook and Instagram!

Chouchou (臭臭) or bantal busuk means ‘smelly [pillow]’ in Mandarin and Malay respectively. While most of us may already have discarded our chouchou, most children (and even adults!) still find it hard to let go. So why are we so attached to our chouchou? Is it because of the smell that reminds us of childhood? In this 4-minute video by Mothership.sg, Dr Jean Liu shares why we might be attached to our chouchou: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBZbTfQ2qZI

Dr Jean Liu is currently working as a Researcher at the National Gallery, and was formerly a WHO consultant & Yale-NUS prof.

Find Dr Liu on Instagram and LinkedIn.

BLIP Lab is currently looking for families to participate in our Baby Talk-a-thon! 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 understand how much of a baby’s daily talk comes from which of the household’s languages, and the language mixes that differ between different homes.

If you have a child aged between 0-4 years old, sign up here: https://ntusingapore.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_868i1NIkpvf00QK

More information about the Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/

We’ve been pre-selected to host a special session for the Interspeech 2023 Conference in August! 📣📣📣

The inaugural MERLIon CCS Challenge focuses on developing robust language identification and language diarization systems that are reliable for non-standard, accented, spontaneous code-switched, child-directed speech collected via Zoom

MERLIon CCS Challenge stands for Multilingual Everyday Recordings Language Identification on Code-switched Child-directed Speech (MERLIon CCS) Challenge.

Aligning closely with Interspeech 2023’s theme, ‘Inclusive Spoken Language Science and Technology – Breaking Down Barriers’, we present the challenge of developing robust language identification and language diarization systems that are reliable for non-standard accented, bilingual, child-directed speech collected via a videocall platform.

The MERLIon CCS Challenge will tackle automatic language identification and language diarization in a subset of audio recordings from the Talk Together Study, where parents narrated an onscreen wordless picturebook to their child.

Find out more about the challenge here: https://sites.google.com/view/merlion-ccs-challenge/home

With further easing of restrictions on gatherings and working arrangements, our team is happy to return to in-lab work and it has been a fruitful year. To wrap up the Talk Together Study, we sent out LEO reports and Junior Scientist certificates to families who participated. Thank you again to all the mummies and daddies and especially the little ones for participating in our massive study! Click here to check out our Facebook post.

Up, up, and away!! As more countries open up their borders, most conferences now have in-person (as well as online) options. Our senior lab members and lab director travelled around the globe to present exciting posters and give talks about all the cool things they’ve been working on at these conferences and workshops:

• SIPS 2022
  • “Help parents better estimate multilingual children’s vocabulary size.” by WOON Fei Ting (Lightning Talk: https://osf.io/4sgbu/)
  • “Fully Transparent ERP Methodology Descriptions with ARTEM-IS Web App” (Workshop) by Prof Suzy Styles and Dr Yu-Fang Yang
• CogSci 2022
  • “Perception of a phoneme contrast in Singapore English-Mandarin bilingual adults: A preregistered study of individual differences.” by Hannah GOH
  • “Sheep’ and ‘Ship’: An investigation into English vowel merger in multilingual Singapore.” by WOON Fei Ting
• ICIS 2022
  • “Code-switching and translanguaging in a large corpus of preschool parent-child interactions.” by Prof Suzy Styles
• Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology 2022
  • “Phoneme identification for high front rounded and unrounded vowels in adult bilinguals of English and Mandarin Chinese: A preregistered study with Bayesian stopping criteria.” by PAN Lei
  • “Child-directed Emotion Talk from Bilingual Singaporean Parents: Wordless Picture Book and Word Listing” by WOON Fei Ting
• LCICD 2022
  • “Which words are repeated most? Bilingual parents repeat nouns and verbs at different ratios when switching between languages in storybook narrations with preschoolers.” by Victoria CHUA (poster presentation)
    “Multilingual Parents Create Multilingual Language Environments: Self-reported Measures and Book-sharing.” by WOON Fei Ting (poster presentation)
• WILD 2022
  • “A pre-registered systematic review of MMNs methods used for categorical perception of sounds with particular attention to speech sounds in infant.” by Dr Han KE

Our PhD candidate PAN Lei also had a paper out on Nature – congratulations!

• Pan, L., Ke, H., & Styles, S. J. (2022). Early linguistic experience shapes bilingual adults’ hearing for phonemes in both languages. Scientific reports, 12(1), 1-11. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-08557-7

Networking and collaborations. Besides going for conferences overseas, we also had the opportunity to invite other researchers to visit us here at the Research Lifespan Centre, where BLIP lab is located. We had a wonderful time with them and exchanged insightful thoughts and ideas on the projects we’re working on.

With Dr Paola at BLIP (she’s the one at the back in a black graphic tee without a lanyard!)

Dr Leibny Paola Garcia visited our lab for a week, starting on the 26th of September. She is a speech engineer from John Hopkins University who shared with us work on automatic language identification done on the transcriptions from our Talk Together Study. She is one of our collaborators and her team at JHU has been working closely with us for the language mixes project.

An impromptu costume party with Gretchen (in the witch hat).

Gretchen McCulloch is the co-creator of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, and the author of “Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language”, which was published by Riverhead (Penguin) in 2019. On November 1st, Gretchen gave a talk called “Data-driven approaches to mythbusting: A case study of internet linguistics.” Drawing from research on pedagogy, the psychology of debunking, and corpus linguistics, Gretchen provided practical links and tips for communicating complex topics more effectively with broader audiences, including students, media, granting agencies, and simply our friends and family.

We’ve also invited researchers from other labs in Singapore to share their work with us at these fun and informational workshops that we hosted right here at the LIFESPAN Research Centre:

Current and future research directions in Singapore Mandarin (16th February). Co-hosted with National University of Singapore FASS Language and Linguistics Research Cluster (Assoc. Prof. Rebecca Starr). The workshop was a venue for researchers across disciplines who are currently working on various facets of Mandarin as it is spoken and used in Singapore to exchange ideas, discuss challenges, share work in progress, and identify future directions for research.

Tech Mixer (28th September). Guests: Prof. Wang Ye (NUS), Prof. Andy Khong (NTU), Dr. Nancy Chen (A*Star), and Dr. Leibny Paola Garcia (JHU). Researchers and their teams across disciplines working on speech processing shared some of their past and ongoing works and gave great responses to some insightful questions from the attendees – there was so much to talk about!

Photos from the Tech Mixer (spot ‘What a Scary Storm!’ from our Talk Together Study)

In other super exciting news, our lab director Dr. Suzy Styles won an award at the Singapore Open Research Conference: NTU Open Research Awards 2022! The NTU Open Research Awards recognize and reward NTU researchers who have used open research to make their scientific contents, tools and processes more open, accessible, transparent and reproducible, or incorporated it in their teaching practices. Link to Dr. Styles’ insightful and informational presentation: https://doi.org/10.21979/N9/TIEEPI

Photos from the Singapore Open Research Conference, with Dr. Styles giving her talk!

This year, we had interns and FYP students join us again in person, where they had the chance to recruit participants and run the I Say You Say study, some EEG capping (where they got their hands dirty with capping gel!) and helped organize and code some data from our Talk Together Study parent-child speech corpus. Our part-time student transcribers also helped us a bunch, and we’ve managed to finish transcribing all our Talk Together Study files – hooray!

Lastly, we’d like to welcome our new staff member CHOO Rui Qi, who joined us as a post-doctoral fellow. Rui Qi is working with us on the Language Mixes project. You can read her Multilingual Memory here: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/multilingual-memories-rui-qis-journey-with-language/

We’re excited to see what the new year brings us – we’re currently tying up some loose ends and carrying out test runs for our Baby Talk-a-thon but we’re hoping to start the study real soon!

• If you have a child aged between 0-4 years old, you can fill up our Interest Check survey here: https://ntusingapore.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_868i1NIkpvf00QK
• More information about the talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/

BLIP lab would like to once again thank everyone who has taken part in our studies! We hope to see you again next year for more exciting things. Happy holidays and a joyful new year to you and your loved ones 😀

Follow our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/bliplabntu

Photo taken from the Singapore Writers Festival Twitter account.

The Singapore Writers Festival is back again in-person this year from 4 – 20 Nov at The Civic District. Look forward to an array of exciting programmes like the Southeast Asian Focus, Youth Fringe, Country Focus, SWF Playground and Literary Pioneer series. The SWF is also one of the few multi-lingual literary festivals in the world with programmes in Chinese, Malay and Tamil language.

“If now, if ever, if you, if I, if not, if never.”
– from “If…Else” by Cyril Wong

The theme for this year’s SWF is ‘if’. It embraces retrospection of what could have been as well as considers the endless possibilities in its future – what can be.

SWF playground

The SWF playground is a specially curated segment of programmes for children between the ages of 4 and 10. From storytelling to craft workshops, the SWF playground aims to inspire little ones to spark their creativity and nurture a love for stories!

Programme Line Up:

Storytime @ The Libraries

Join for a session of storytelling where they share some interesting and fun tales with children.

Age group: 4 – 6 years old
Admission: Free
Visit the SWF website for location and timing details

Superstorytastic @ The Libraries

Join our storytellers as they bring you into a world of fascinating stories and tales. Fun and excitement awaits you!

Ages group: 7 – 10 years old
Admission: Free
Visit the SWF website for location and timing details

Dialect Story telling @NGS

Have fun with the fast-disappearing Chinese dialects in Singapore and rediscover the charming nursery rhymes and stories of yore. This session is in Mandarin, English, as well as the dialects of Cantonese, Teochew, Hokkien, Hainanese and Hakka.

Date: 5 November 2022
Time: 11.30 am – 1 pm
Location: NGS Courtyard
Admission: Free

A different story will be told every half hour at 11.30am, 12pm and 12.30pm.

Dialect Story telling library@harbourfront

Have fun with the fast-disappearing Chinese dialects in Singapore and rediscover the charming nursery rhymes and stories of yore. This session is in Mandarin, English, as well as the dialects of Cantonese, Teochew, Hokkien, Hainanese and Hakka.

Date: 12 November 2022
Time: 11.30 am – 1 pm
Location: library@harbourfront
Admission: Free

A different story will be told every half hour at 11.30am, 12pm and 12.30pm.

Bengkel Reka Wayang Kulit dan Bercerita Wayang Puppet-making and Storytelling Workshop

Immerse yourself in crafting and storytelling using wayang puppets with Indonesian comic artist, Is Yuniarto. In this workshop, Is teaches participants to craft wayang puppets out of any persona of their pick, to weave and tell their own epic stories in Malay.

Date: 12 November 2022
Time: 10 am – 12.30 pm
Location: National Gallery Singapore, Roof Top Studio 3
Age group: 8 years old and above
Admission: Free with registration

Thinkதமிழ் Academy-யுடன் இருமொழி கதைசொல்லும் பயிலரங்கு Bilingual Storytelling Workshop with ThinkTamil Academy

Join in an immersive bilingual storytelling and arts & craft workshop in Tamil and English for children by ThinkTamil Academy.

Date: 12 November 2022
Time: 10.30 am – 12 pm
Location: SWF Village
Age group: 4 – 6 years old
Admission: Ticketed / $9

《西游记》发生了什么事？What Happens on the Journey to the West?

Learn about the magic of shadow puppetry in this workshop for children, which provides a friendly introduction to puppetry and puppet mechanics. Then, make your own shadow puppet and discover what makes them so expressive in action.

Date: 12 November 2022
Session 1: 1pm-3pm (Conducted in Chinese)
Session 2: 4pm-6pm (Conducted in English)
Session 3: 7pm-9pm (Conducted in English)
Location: National Gallery Singapore, Roof Top Studio 1 & 3
Age group: 8 – 12 years old
Admission: Ticketed / $30

These are just some of the exciting events by the SWF. For the full programme line-up and other information like the sale festival passes or separately ticketed programmes, visit www.singaporewritersfestival.com – see you there!