Jasper Sim

Jasper Sim is an Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He completed his PhD (2022) in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, with a thesis exploring early phonological acquisition in multi-accent Singapore. His research focuses on issues that sit at the intersections of child language acquisition, phonetics, and sociolinguistics. He is also interested in language processing and in issues related to language, race, and culture. 

Acquiring and processing multi-accent Singapore English

The emergence of phonology relies on linguistic input, from which children extract language-specific information necessary for building phonological and phonetic representations. While some speech features in child-directed speech may be relatively more canonical than in adult-directed speech, the phonetic input that a child receives is rarely invariant. Sociolinguistic and experiential factors contribute to such variability. In this talk, I demonstrate how long-term language contact and the effects of individual bilingualism have contributed to phonetic and phonological variation in the speech input to children in Singapore, and I explore the effects of such variability on their phonological development. I conclude by discussing future work and some questions about what it means for speech processing of Singapore English.