The Talk Together Study was designed to create a rich collection of parent-child speech interactions in a fully online environment. With COVID-19 restrictions and social distancing measures in place, the BLIP team had to find different ways to collect naturalistic parent-child speech interactions since we couldn’t have parents and children coming down to our lab.
Close to 150 parent-child pairs volunteered to take part in our micro-longitudinal* randomized control* study, where parents completed a series of online surveys about their language environment as well as video call sessions which included sharing a wordless picture storybook with their child.
Screengrab from a video call with parent and child
The wordless picture storybook, created by our lab director Prof Suzy Styles, was about a little Orangutan who got caught in a storm. Parents were asked to read the book to their child in their own words and in any language(s) they’re comfortable with. They seem to really enjoy the storybook! Read ‘Little Orangutan: What A Scary Storm!’ by Dr Suzy Styles here: https://doi.org/10.21979/N9/MJMFXV
Recently, we published an article in Frontiers detailing our online data-collection methods used in the Talk Together Study. In ‘Creating a Corpus of Multilingual Parent-Child Speech Remotely: Lessons Learned in a Large-Scale Onscreen Picturebook Sharing Task’, we discussed the methods we used, and the lessons learned during adapting and running the study which cover nine domains of research design, monitoring and feedback. Some notable points from our paper are that Singaporean parents are:
- Interested in finding out how to engage their child verbally
- More likely to be recruited online via parent forums and Facebook groups
- Comfortable with doing an experiment procedure over Zoom with a researcher
- More likely to complete surveys that are online and easily accessible
We hope that this report provides some insight into ways researchers can conduct studies of a similar nature.
Read our full report here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.734936/full
Over the past few weeks, we’ve also given out some extra gifts to 15 families via a Lucky Draw! Head over to our Facebook page where we’re posting some delightful photos of our lucky Junior Scientists with their prizes: http://facebook.com/bliplabntu
If you’ve missed the chance to participate in our Talk Together Study, you might be interested in our upcoming Baby Talk-a-thon! We’re recruiting families with children from ages 0-4 years. Sign up here: https://ntuhss.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_868i1NIkpvf00QK
More information about our Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/
*A randomized control study uses randomized control trials (RCT) where participants were randomly placed in either an intervention or control group. Participants in the intervention group were given tips to enhance parent-child interactions across 4 weeks, while participants in the control group were given general information about parent-child interactions.
*A longitudinal study is a study that takes place over a period of time. Our Talk Together Study is considered micro-longitudinal as parent-child pairs were invited to take part over a course of three timepoints, with 4 weeks in between the different timepoints