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