Wrapping up 2022 (Hello 2023!)

InfoSheet

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!

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!

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 😀

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