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Transcript Episode 77: How kids learn language in Singapore - Interview with Woon Fei Ting

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘How kids learn language in Singapore - Interview with Woon Fei Ting’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. I’m here with Woon Fei Ting who’s a Research Associate and the Lab Manager at the Brain, Language & Intersensory Perception Lab at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about kids in multilingual environments. We’d like to extend a huge thanks to Dr. Suzy Styles, who heads the BLIP lab at NTU, for hosting me in Singapore! Check out our interview with Suzy about which words sound spiky across languages. See the link in the show notes. But first, some announcements. We’re doing another Lingthusiasm liveshow just a few days after this episode goes up. The liveshow is online at 4:00 p.m. on February the 18th, for me in Montreal, or 8:00 a.m. on the 19th for Lauren in Melbourne, 2023. Follow the link in the show notes fore more time zones. This liveshow is a Q&A about language and gender with returning special guest, Dr. Kirby Conrod. You may remember Kirby from their very popular episode about the grammar of “singular they,” so we’re bringing them back for more informal discussion which you can participate in. You can ask your language and gender-y questions or share your examples and stories in the comments on Patreon or in the AMA questions channel on Discord in advance or bring them along to the liveshow. You can join the Lingthusiasm liveshow by becoming a patron at the Lingthusiast tier or higher. This is also the tier that has access to our monthly bonus episodes – most recently, a chat between me and Lauren about what’s coming up in the year ahead, including our plans to keep giving you regular episodes while Lauren’s on parental leave. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to the liveshow, monthly bonus episodes, and more.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Fei Ting, welcome to the show!

Fei Ting: Hi, thanks for having me. This is the first time I’m doing any kind of interview and the first time being on a podcast.

Gretchen: Amazing! We’re excited to be your very first time. Can we start with the question that we ask all of our guests? How did you get into linguistics?

Fei Ting: My younger sibling was diagnosed with dyslexia when she was maybe around the age of 9 or 10, then she started going for English language classes to help her spell. That was when my older sibling and I started realising that we display a lot of the same quote-unquote “symptoms,” or we have the same struggles. I started doing a little bit of reading and got really interested in this idea of, oh, maybe we’re all dyslexic, but then she got a diagnosis because it was a lot more prominent, or it came out a lot more in her day-to-day schooling. Later on in high school, my high school is right next to a school for children with cerebral palsy. I would go over once a week to be a teaching assistant to help out if the teachers need any help. One of the things that we did was to bring the children to their speech therapy sessions. The speech therapist there at that time was a very nice lady. She was from India. She was teaching some of these children how to pronounce particular consonants or vowel sounds as best as they could. She spoke with a really heavy accent. I thought to myself, “Well, these children are Singaporean children, and they’re receiving speech therapy in an accent that is unfamiliar to them” –

Gretchen: Yeah, is this gonna be any use for them?

Fei Ting: Yeah, and they are – well, a lot of them have a lot of, as you can imagine, modal difficulties, some of them with language development difficulties. When they mimic, they also mimic the accent as well.

Gretchen: So, they’re gonna be mimicking her accent, which is a perfectly fine accent to have but not what the rest of their family and community have.

Fei Ting: Yeah. At that time, I was just thinking about, okay, this is a cool job. I had never come across speech therapy before in my life. I didn’t even know what it was. So, when I first learned about it, I thought, “Wow, that’s really cool!” But at the same time, I also thought, “Maybe this is what I wanna do in the future.” I set out looking at which universities to go to, what do I have to do to become a speech therapist. It led me on to this path of going to university for linguistics, and then I taught for a little bit. I taught for about 4 years.

Gretchen: Teaching what?

Fei Ting: Teaching English after graduation. In between, I did some volunteering work, and I looked at the overall job market for speech therapy in Singapore. The thing about it in Singapore is a lot of our speech therapists don’t really get to do a lot of speech therapy per se.

Gretchen: Oh, that seems like it’s not the thing you came into the job for.

Fei Ting: A lot of them end up doing elderly care, swallowing therapy with patients that might have suffered from a stroke.

Gretchen: But you were excited about working with kids.

Fei Ting: Yeah. I was told by almost every speech therapist that there isn’t that much focus on research right now because they are hoping that a lot of people just graduate with a master’s in speech therapy and then go work in a hospital. Then you will likely not be working with children.

Gretchen: I guess there’s the question of like, what are Singaporean children quote-unquote “expected” to be able to do at a certain age or is there even research on what their typically developing peers would be able to do in this context that would help you devise therapy programmes for kids.

Fei Ting: At that point, no. I think right now as well – this is the current work that we’re doing, right, looking at children growing up in Singapore, which is a really multilingual environment. The documentation of regular kids, we don’t have good documentation of that yet, and therefore, you can think about how, for children that have some sort of language delay or developmental disorders, we don’t have therapy that might be tailored to our variety of English and the other languages that we speak here.

Gretchen: I feel like something that I’ve heard from people in more monolingual or monolingual-ish language environments in Canada/the US is “Oh, well, my sibling got diagnosed with dyslexia or something, and so my parents stopped speaking our heritage language to the kid because they thought it would confuse them, and they did only English.” We know that lots of people are multilingual, and this is fine, but there isn’t a good amount of knowledge about what does it look like to develop in a multilingual environment where this is normal and expected and everyone is doing this. It would cause difficulties to not be able to function in that multilingual space because you can’t talk to your grandparents, or you can’t talk to people in some stores that you go into. That’s also part of what you need for functioning in a language is having access to multiple language spaces.

Fei Ting: That’s exactly right. In Singapore – well, I think this is unfortunate – some of the children who are diagnosed with dyslexia earlier on, they will be given recommendations to not do the – well, we call it here the “mother tongue languages,” which in schools are taught as Mandarin Chinese, Malay, or Tamil. The recommendation is, well, don’t do your mother tongue language as a subject.

Gretchen: Only do English, and that’s it.

Fei Ting: Only do English, yeah, which as you mentioned, it then becomes difficult for the child to converse with people around them or their family members who might not be using English.

Gretchen: Right. Because the norm of the research that’s been happening on kids with various developmental disabilities has been doing it on monolingual populations, which then makes it seem like you need to be monolingual in order to benefit from the various kinds of therapies that people do.

Fei Ting: The common misconception is, if you’re already struggling in one, and that one language is usually English, then let’s not burden your brain with a second one. But languages are so different. Mandarin Chinese is radically different compared to English both in the way it looks as well as the structure, so processing of Mandarin Chinese is also different. There isn’t enough research right now to support saying that a child who is English-Mandarin bilingual will benefit from not having to do Mandarin as a subject in school.

Gretchen: I mean, the brain is very flexible, very plastic, and so the things you make the brain do, it almost makes me wonder if being exposed to more languages would help because you’re giving the brain more practice in doing language stuff, but I dunno if there’s data on this.

Fei Ting: Well, we don’t know enough.

Gretchen: But you’re not currently a speech therapist.

Fei Ting: No, I’m not.

Gretchen: You work in a language lab. How did that happen, and what are you working on now?

Fei Ting: I did my undergraduate degree in linguistics, which I loved. It was fantastic. I think for the first time when our professors were like, “Let’s do research on the languages that you speak,” it was the first time that I thought, “Oh, you mean I can study Singapore English, like Singlish, in an academic setting? You mean it’s worthy of being studied?” I think that was the first thing. Then later on, after graduation, because I had looked at what speech therapy is and isn’t in Singapore currently, I thought, “Well, maybe I should go and do some work, earn some money, and then think about whether or not I wanna do grad school,” and then I think eventually settled on just my love for research more than being a therapist or going out and practicing in a clinical setting. I decided to pursue my master’s, and then after that, I just stayed with the same lab.

Gretchen: As a day-to-day level, as a lab manager, you’re working with and supervising the various studies that are being run by the professors and students and people in the lab. Yeah, what do you do as a lab manager?

Fei Ting: The number one thing is coordinating the different studies that go on. We have studies that are carried out independently by our PhD students. We also have studies that we run as a group amongst all of our research assistants and our student assistants, and then just making sure that everything is running on schedule. I also do a lot of prep before any study’s been conducted. We write all of our surveys. We make sure that all of the equipment is well set up. Then there is also the administrative side of things, which is the boring and less-glamorous part of research.

Gretchen: This is working on writing grants or filling out paperwork to get permission to work with children. You have to go through the ethics board and tell them, “No, we’re not gonna harm the children. It’s gonna be fine. They’re just gonna look at some pictures and hear some sounds or something.” If you’ve got equipment – like you’ve got an EEG machine, which is the electrode cap that you put on your head, and you can see the brain waves going. I guess that probably needs to be maintained.

Fei Ting: We need to watch that very thoroughly. We need to train our students when they come into the lab on how to use it. We have interns come in every summer, and they do good work with us. I also manage all of our interns and, I think, help our students or our undergrads see what’s the reality behind doing research. I think, very often, they might think about grad school, or they might think about moving into the field of academia after graduation, just seeing the glam side of things, or looking at papers that are being published, or books that are being written.

Gretchen: And papers look very polished, right. Like, “Oh, we did this thing. We had 32 infants. They came in and did this.” It doesn’t tell you like, “This infant started crying, and so we had to exclude them,” or like, “These infants – we tried to call their parents, and they wouldn’t reply to our messages, and so they wouldn’t come in. We actually tried to get 52, but only 32 came.”

Fei Ting: Yes, the day-to-day of it is very mundane. A lot of the work that we are focusing now on is understanding the linguistic landscape for children growing up in Singapore, so we wanna find out what’s going on at home: Who is talking to them, and in what languages, and in what proportion? The best way to do that right now is to send them home with a little recorder.

Gretchen: I’ve seen this recorder. It’s sort of the size of a credit card but thicker. You put it in a shirt that the child wears, and it has a little Velcro pocket, so it doesn’t fall it. Then it runs, and the kid can run around, and you’re not trying to keep them in front of a mic where they have to stay still, which because they’re toddlers, they’re not gonna do that. You can hear anything that the infant says and also anything that someone says, like an adult or an older child, says around them.

Fei Ting: That’s right. That recorder goes on for about 10-16 hours on its own. When we get that recording back, the humans have to go listen to these recordings. We do a lot of transcription work. That is one of the day-to-day mundane things. It’s not exciting. You sit in front of a computer, and you open up a file, and you’re listening, maybe, for an hour before you have to stop because it’s just too much. We do a lot of fine-grained transcription. We’re not only noting down the words that are being said, we are also looking at who’s saying it; we’re counting the number of turns; we’re making it for the different languages. Right now, I’m speaking English, but the day-to-day conversation for a Singaporean household might be English plus a lot of other things that are going on. Maybe it’s different from what we conventionally understand as code-switching or the way that code-switching is being described in textbooks is that you switch very elegantly from one language to the other in a nice, wrapped up sentence.

Gretchen: Right. So, it’s saying like, okay, I’m gonna say this bit in, for me, English, and then French or something, and I’m going back and forth. This implies that these two languages are distinct entities that I’m switching back and forth between them. But if you’ve grown up in a multilingual household your whole life, and your parents have also grown up in a multilingual household, what you’re also doing is producing the whole spectrum in a way that’s like how people have produced it around you but also may be a little bit different.

Fei Ting: It’s not “clean” code switching. It happens within an utterance. People swap out words, and sometimes it’s conscious, sometimes it’s unconscious, sometimes it’s deliberate to make a point. The way that we describe it, or I like to think about it, is if you have a salad bowl of different components – you have your tomatoes; you have your cucumber and onions – as I’m speaking to a different person, I can decide which part of the salad I wanna pick, which ingredient I wanna pick. It’s not a clean switch. For me, it would be English and Mandarin. It's not a clean switch between the two. Then, of course, there’s this very exciting thing called “Singlish.”

Gretchen: This is stuff that’s unique to Singapore. “Singlish” seems to imply that it’s English-y, but there’s stuff from lots of languages involved.

Fei Ting: When I was in university, and when we first looked at it from a very academic setting, it’s often described as a “creoloid.” It’s a little bit like a creole but maybe not. Then people have explained to it say that, oh, the backbone of Singlish is English, and then it’s added with all these vocabulary from non-English languages.

Gretchen: This is gonna be like Chinese but less Mandarin.

Fei Ting: Less Mandarin, for sure. More Hokkien. In some other parts of the world, “Hokkien” is also referred to as “Min Nan.” Then some Cantonese, some Teochew, Hakka, and then some Malay, and some Tamil.

Gretchen: So, Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, and Hakka are all Chinese varieties within that, and then Malay and Tamil are separate from other regions of the world. These are all groups that have been part of Singapore.

Fei Ting: We were colonised by the British for a long time. Before that time, we didn’t really have people living on the island. Well, historically, if you look at it, there were fishermen or fishing villages, but largely this island is uninhabited. Then when the British came, and they decide to develop this place, or this island, as a port, obviously, lots of people came for work opportunities. We saw a lot of migration from modern-day south part of China, so the Guangzhou/Guangdong region. We also saw some migration from modern-day Malaysia and Indonesia and then from the southern part of India. That’s why the Indian language that’s spoken here, predominantly, by people at that time was Tamil instead of Hindi, for example.

Gretchen: These are the big ethnic groups in Singapore’s history. And then when people are coming into contact with them, they get mixed together – people using words from all sorts of sources. This is what kids are exposed to in the home. It’s not just “Oh, here’s Chinese. Here’s Mandarin,” which is the most famous version of Chinese, “but also here are words from Hokkien or Teochew or these other varieties,” and also, I guess, probably depending on the kid’s heritage, whether they’re gonna have more Malay words or more Tamil words or more Chinese words.

Fei Ting: That’s right.

Gretchen: What does this look like when you’re trying to say, “Here are the results that we have. This is what kids are getting exposed to”?

Fei Ting: I think the thing that we didn’t expect was to do so much language documentation as part of this project. Because what we wanna do is find out, you know, what are kids growing up hearing. But then, along the way, because we were collecting all of this data, we are also documenting what is the current state of things for what Singlish sounds like or what we can say what Singlish is in a household right now. If we look at the Singapore census, the last one was taken in 2020, a huge number of the younger population now say that English is the predominant home language. It has crossed the 50% threshold for the younger age groups. That’s a first in our country’s history. You can also imagine that the English here or the Singlish here is changing rapidly compared to my parents’ or my grandparents’ era.

Gretchen: What people are doing is changing. If you say English is a dominant home language, that’s picking one out of probably there are still several languages being spoken in this mixed way.

Fei Ting: Understanding what Singlish is is one thing, and then when we are writing it in our paper, how do we make ourselves well understood for an audience that is unfamiliar with research in a non-standard variety. One of the things that we tried explaining is this term that we use called “red-dot.” We have a current study going on called “Red-dot Baby-talk” where we have a list of words that we come up with based on what we know Singaporean parents use with their children, and we’re asking Singaporeans, “At what age do you think a child would know this word?” and “Would you use this word with a child?”

Gretchen: Just to back up for second. “Red-dot” is a term for Singapore, right, because if you look at a big map of the world, it’s a city state, effectively, it’s about the size of a red dot on a map. So, this is an affectionate way of referring to Singapore-specific words.

Fei Ting: Mm-hmm, yeah. One of the words would be “pom pom.” I might say it to a child after they’ve had a long day, and they’re sweaty, and I say, “Okay, now it’s time to pom-pom.”

Gretchen: Is this like “have a bath” or “a shower” or something?

Fei Ting: Yeah! That’s right. We don’t know – at least I have no idea – where that word came from. My guess is it’s from one of these Chinese varieties that we talked about just now, but I’m not 100% certain.

Gretchen: Right. Because it doesn’t have a clear etymology linked to any particular language. It’s just this is a word people use in Singapore with kids.

Fei Ting: Then we have “zut-zut,” which is the thing that you give to a crying child.

Gretchen: Like a candy or something, or a toy?

Fei Ting: Like a pacifier.

Gretchen: “Pacifier,” “binky,” “dummy” – I’ve heard a lot of words for it – “soother.”

Fei Ting: Then we also have the word “sayang.” “sayang” is – well, originated from Malay, but the use of it in Malay, it’s very different from the use of it in Singlish. In Malay, it can be used as a verb to mean, like, “love.” It can also be used as a term of affection. You can call someone your “sayang,” your “darling.” But in Singlish, it’s this action of stroking very gently. If you see a little cat, you might tell your child to “sayang” the cat.

Gretchen: “Make sure you do it gently and don’t pull the cat’s fur and their tail and make them scratch you.”

Fei Ting: If someone in that context is using the word “sayang,” I wouldn’t necessarily say that that person is code switching into Malay.

Gretchen: Right, because it has a different meaning in Malay, and they’re not using it with that meaning.

Fei Ting: And I’m not a Malay speaker, so when I use the word “sayang,” I can’t say that I’m code switching into Malay. I’ve just chosen a token in Singlish.

Gretchen: I can see how they’re used in a child-specific context, but there’re other parts of Singlish that are just part of the everyday vocabulary for adults and stuff as well.

Fei Ting: Yes, yes, yes, that’s right. So, you’ve been here a few days now, and food is a big thing in Singapore, and when food is good or when things are going well, in a good scenario, we can say, “shiok.”

Gretchen: I’ve seen this on some signs. It seems to be – I was walking in one of the streets, and they were saying, “shiok” because they were trying to say, “This food is good,” and it’s good in a Singaporean sort of way. I think the sign said, “Shiok lah,” which was maybe a little bit trying to be really heavy on the Singlish thing because “lah” is this famous word in Singlish that is used as a particle at the end of sentences for a lot of different purposes.

Fei Ting: For a lot of different purposes. We have a lot of these sentence-final, utterance-final particles. Origin of it is from Chinese varieties. We have “lah,” “leh,” “meh,” “hor,” “liao” – maybe lots of other ones that I’m missing right now.

Gretchen: There’s probably a whole list. I mean, we can link to some things about Singlish if people want to get a larger picture of what’s going on. This is not the teach-us-Singlish-in-half-an-hour episode. But yeah, the one that I’ve heard people say a fair bit is “lah” because it seems to be pretty common. It’s like a confirmation or question.

Fei Ting: Confirmation. It’s also sometimes used to make something sound final and definitive. Like if you ask me if I could do something, and I say, “Can lah.”

Gretchen: This gets us to another one that I’ve also heard people use which is “Can” by itself as sort of a response to questions or whether something can happen. I was in a cab, and the cab driver said, “Can?”, as in, “Can you get out okay?”, or “Are you doing this?”, and I guess I probably should’ve responded, “Can,” but I don’t have this naturally yet. Maybe if I’m here a little bit longer.

Fei Ting: You can say, “Can,” or “Can can.” “Can can” is to confirm that you can actually do something, or it can happen.

Gretchen: I think the closest thing that I have to that in my English is “Can do,” which still drops the subject or doesn’t have the subject there, but for some reason I want the “do” to be there – “Can do.” Or like, “I can,” “I think I can,” compared to, I heard someone say, “Think can,” where I would say, “I think I can.”

Fei Ting: Over here “Think can” or “I think can” is very well-formed. “I think I can” is –

Gretchen: Almost too much?

Fei Ting: Yeah, almost too much.

Gretchen: Or you’re being very emphatic about that it’s “I” think I can – may “you” don’t. This is probably Chinese influence, right?

Fei Ting: Yeah. If we think about Chinese as a language that determines the topic of the sentence first, and then you add comments to that topic, that’s why we can go about dropping the subject or dropping a lot of these modal verbs. One of the studies that we did previously was, well, one of our undergrads started this project. We ask people to look at different menus and order the same dish but to imagine themselves in three different settings. The first setting is the menu is printed on really nice, fancy paper, and fancy font, and it’s supposed to mimic a fancy restaurant. The second menu is in casual font, and the setting is a hip café. Then the last one, we didn’t have a menu, but it was just a picture of a hawker centre stall front.

Gretchen: The hawker centres have a whole bunch of little marketplaces but indoors. They have all these food stalls. You go around from each one and you sit – I think of them as cafeteria tables. You sit out at them. You have a tray, and you get food and drinks and desserts and stuff from different places. This is very informal.

Fei Ting: Yeah, very, very informal. We had undergrads come in and order the same dish which is the dish of laksa.

Gretchen: Which I’ve now had. It was very good. It’s kind of a spicy soup.

Fei Ting: Yeah. And then the instruction was that, when they ordered it, they have to ask for more chili, and they should ask to take it away.

Gretchen: Just to give them more things to say.

Fei Ting: Yeah. So, when people are imagining themselves in a very fancy restaurant, they might say, “Can I please have a bowl of laksa? Can you add more chili? And I would like to have it taken away.”

Gretchen: These very full sentences and trying to be polite and add this extra ornamentation around that.

Fei Ting: Mm-hmm. Then when you do a syntax analysis on it, I mean, we draw grammar trees, you end up with a very complex grammar tree or quite a number of grammar trees just to explain this one scenario. But when they’re given a picture of a hawker stall, and they’re supposed to imagine a very informal setting, they can say something like, “Aunty, one laksa, more chili, takeaway.”

Gretchen: “Aunty, one laksa, more chili, takeaway,” just saying each of the bits of information without, “Oh, please, if you don’t mind, can I have this.”

Fei Ting: You don’t need the “Can I have…” You don’t need the extra verbs or the extra sentence structure. It’s just the topic – “one laksa,” and then “more chili,” and then “takeaway.”

Gretchen: And this is not rude. This is polite. This is a normal thing you say. And you’ve said “Aunty” because you’re addressing the stall owner as “Aunty” or “Uncle,” based on who they are, which is polite.

Fei Ting: That’s also another thing about – I think you hear it here in Singapore. You also would hear it in Malaysia. This calling everyone “Aunty” and “Uncle” even though they’re not related to you if they are somewhere like the age your parents might be, and then you just – “Aunty,” “Uncle” – everyone is.

Gretchen: You have other words for people who are closer in age to you or younger?

Fei Ting: Not quite.

Gretchen: It’s more about elders.

Fei Ting: It’s more for elders. If I approach, like – or if I’m in a cab – the “Taxi Uncle” might address me as “Xiao Mei,” like “Little Girl” or “Young Girl.” Or if I’m ordering something, and they wanna be nice and polite, they might say, “Mei Nü,” which is “Pretty Girl.” Even though –

Gretchen: They’re not hitting on you. This is just a polite thing to say.

Fei Ting: Yeah. But usually you will hear them say “Xiao Mei,” which is “Little Girl,” to a female and then “Xiao Di” to a guy ordering something.

Gretchen: Because you have that age thing. In French, I’m used to people addressing me as “Madame” or “Mademoiselle.” There was a period when I was getting 50/50, and now it’s mostly “Madame,” so clearly people think I’ve gotten older. But there was a period when it depended on what on wore for which one I would get. How strangers address you in public is just –

Fei Ting: If my mom were to go to the market, for example, she might address someone working there as “Aunty,” and then they will also address her as “Aunty.”

Gretchen: We’re both at the right age where we could have nieces and nephews, so we’re both “Aunties” now.

Fei Ting: And that’s perfectly fine.

Gretchen: You’ve also been doing some interesting things with research methodology and how to get this audio data, apart from bringing parents into the lab and having them talk to kids.

Fei Ting: Well, with COVID, everything was interrupted. I think people who are doing research – everyone would commiserate over our lack of ability to reach out to parents with little kids. We did a years-long study on Zoom.

Gretchen: So, you get parents talking to their kids on Zoom. Kids aren’t always very good at interacting with a computer, with the technology.

Fei Ting: We had 8- to 36-month-olds. The task was for their parents to describe to them a wordless picture book on Zoom. Sometimes, like you said, some kids are clearly not interested.

Gretchen: But at least having a picture book to look at gives them something to do on camera and not just like, “C’mon, talk! Talk to the nice research aunty.”

Fei Ting: Exactly. Because the picture book is wordless, it’s up to them in what language they would like to do the task in. Some parents get very excited about describing every single thing on the screen instead of just following along the main storyline. Sometimes, they will break off to “Oh, you remember, we saw an elephant” – because in the book, there is an elephant – and then they might, “the other day” or “the other time, we went to the zoo. We saw an elephant. You remember.” And then they might go on talking about other things, which is a nice thing about wordless picture books, actually.

Gretchen: It just gives them some stimulus to talk about, rather than just being like, “Okay, here we are in front of a computer. All we can talk about is the computer.” Now, you’ve got the elephant as a topic of conversation.

Fei Ting: And I don’t know about kids growing up in this COVID period. Maybe they’ve gotten used to seeing another human onscreen. We didn’t have kids who were like, “Ah, this is so weird. I don’t wanna do this anymore.”

Gretchen: Because they’re already talking to, probably, other friends and family members and things using Zoom because they’re pandemic babies.

Fei Ting: Exactly. We had some funny things that happened. This brings back to the reality of doing research. Sometimes, I would have parents carry the laptop they were talking to me on, on Zoom, and chasing after their kid, or like, “Ah, just come back here. This nice lady is waiting for us to finish the story,” and things like that happened. Or because we’re recording them in their home, sometimes someone walks into the room that they’re in. These sort of unexpected scenarios do pop up from time to time, but we’re really happy with the data that we managed to collect.

Gretchen: Do you have results for that yet?

Fei Ting: We have a methods paper out because, as part of the study, we ran it as a micro-longitudinal intervention study.

Gretchen: What does that mean?

Fei Ting: The intervention that we ran was for the parents. We wanted to see if giving parents tips – concrete tips – on what they can do with their child to improve or to add on to the kind of talk they can have with their child, whether or not that would influence or change the way that they would communicate with their kids. The baseline was describing the wordless picture book the first time, and then they would go through an intervention for –

Gretchen: So, they would get text messages every day for 28 days that would say things like, “Have you considered singing songs with your kid?”, or “When you see pictures, talking about what’s in the pictures,” or something like that?

Fei Ting: Every day we gave them a tip. The tips start out really easy like doing some counting, and then the last we tell parents about concepts that might be a bit more advanced, things like mental state verbs – so verbs like “I think” or “I wonder.” There is literature to show that when you use mental state verbs with your child, 1). you’re helping them imagine scenarios they are not in, right, think about it from someone else’s perspective. So, this ties in with this thing called the “theory of mind.” Then when you use these words, especially in English, your sentences get a bit more complex.

Gretchen: Because if you’re saying, “I think this,” and then you have to have another sentence in there, which is not quite the same thing if you’re doing like, “Think can.”

Fei Ting: Exactly. After 28 days, we see them again on Zoom for the same video call picture book description. Then we ran it as an RTT – randomised control trial.

Gretchen: So, they’re randomly in one group that has these 28 tips in between, and then another group that has something less.

Fei Ting: The other group, we only gave them one email a week. There’re no concrete tips. It’s just emphasising on how important it is to talk to their child. But because the way we advertise it, we said, “You can sign up. We’ll give you some tips.”

Gretchen: Ah, so this was important to make parents wanna participate in the study because they think they’re doing something good for their child by getting some tips there. Because there’s lots of reasons people wanna participate in studies. Sometimes, you pay them. Sometimes, the kid gets a toy or something. But also, in this case they wanted to feel like they were getting some help with raising a kid.

Fei Ting: Yeah. After the first 28 days and then after we saw them for a second time point, we swapped both groups of parents around. If you had intervention, now you’re in the non-intervention group, and you only got one email per week. Then the parents who didn’t get the tips previously, they now got a message every day.

Gretchen: So, are you sitting there texting all the parents individually? Or do you have an automatic system?

Fei Ting: No, we don’t. Our research assistant, Shaza, she was doing all the texting. Because it was a rolling sign up programme –

Gretchen: You have some people who are on Day 2, and some people who’re on Day 20, and they each need to get a different message. It’s almost complicated to program.

Fei Ting: It’s difficult. She would text them at 10:00 in the morning and say, “Today’s tip is this.” And then with each tip, we would also give a link to our website where they can read more if they wanted to. In the evening, around 4:00 to 5:00 p.m., she would text them again and say, “Hi Parent, did you try our tip today? How did you find it?” That’s the other unique part of our intervention because a lot of the times when people are in an intervention, they’re left alone for the entirety, and then at the end they might be given a feedback survey.

Gretchen: It’s almost just as much about having the support for talking about what parenting was like and reflecting on using language with their child that they feel like they got some sort of emotional support out of it.

Fei Ting: Yeah. Or any kind of interaction. Because at that time, well, we started collecting data June of 2020.

Gretchen: This is lockdown.

Fei Ting: Lockdown, right. A lot of parents were working from home. People couldn’t see their family members. So, having a researcher to talk to might be nice.

Gretchen: [Laughs] Yeah, that’s kind of nice.

Fei Ting: Or a lot of children, if they were going to infant care or day care, all of that had stopped.

Gretchen: Of course.

Fei Ting: I guess for a lot of parents, it was like, “Oh, I’m given some kind of support!”

Gretchen: It would be interesting, I guess, to try to figure out how much of that was pandemic or lockdown specific, especially if the parent is becoming the child’s only or primary source of language input in a way that, if they’re going to child care or preschool or seeing their relatives and stuff like that, they wouldn’t be as much dependent on one or two people for talking with the child all the time as language input, they would have a broader community access.

Fei Ting: That’s right. I think that was one of the things that parents have told us, like, “Oh, yeah, language input has changed.” It’s not something that they actively thought about, but then they’re like, “Oh, yeah, my kid’s not getting that much Malay because, well, my mom speaks to them in Malay, but now we can’t visit grandma anymore.”

Gretchen: This changes the way that the language input goes.

Fei Ting: We have a methods paper out. We are still transcribing.

Gretchen: Transcribing takes so long.

Fei Ting: It does.

Gretchen: I think the estimate that I learned in grad school was, like, for every one minute of audio, it takes an hour to transcribe.

Fei Ting: That’s the pace that we’re going at. We have been very blessed with lots of great transcribers and student assistants who’ve come in and helped us, so we are almost there. We’re very happy that we have 142 parents and families that stayed with us through all three time points. I think it’s a little rare to see that for a longitudinal study involving children.

Gretchen: They had nothing else to do in lockdown, so they stayed in your study.

Fei Ting: Yeah, I like to think that. And I also like to think that we were nice, and they found it useful.

Gretchen: To have the supportive text messages every day.

Fei Ting: We’re going into the next stage where we will be doing some analysis. We’re counting number of turns taken. We’re counting number of words and the diversity of words being used and whether or not people swapped or changed or code switched in any way.

Gretchen: And then you end up with, also, this linguistic landscape of how people are talking in their homes, at least, when they have a kid around. And you can see which bits there. When you’re talking about code switching, you can say, “Okay, these words are in English. These words are specifically in Hokkien or Mandarin. These words are in Tamil or Malay,” but you also have the Singlish-specific words, the Red-dot words, that are hard to pin down for one particular language.

Fei Ting: We’ve essentially written our own little dictionary, actually.

Gretchen: That’s great!

Fei Ting: Along the way, we were like, ah, there’s this word that’s come up, but because a lot of Singlish hasn’t been codified or documented, there is no one way to spell it.

Gretchen: Of course. Because it’s mostly spoken.

Fei Ting: If we’ve decided to spell it one way, we always have to check with other Singlish speakers around us, and then – we don’t wanna say, “Oh, we’re spelling it this way, and this way must be right.” We’re saying, “We have to come up with something.”

Gretchen: You have to pick one because if you wanna say, “Okay, for every hundred words that this parent says, 30 of them are in Malay, 50 of them are in English, 23 of them are in Singlish/Red-dot words.” It’s hard to pin down exactly which of them are from where, but you need to be able to look through and say, “This one word, ‘shiok,’ is being used this many times in the whole corpus,” not “We spelled it 14 different ways, and so we have no idea how many times it’s being used,” just for your own internal purposes, which isn’t to say that someone else is wrong for using a different spelling.

Fei Ting: That’s right. We wanna be very open about it, so we have a Wiki page that’s open for anyone who wants to come and look at our transcription conventions. Our dictionary is also open access, so people can come in and take a look at that, at how we’ve decided to codify certain things just because we need it for our own, like you mentioned, counts and things like that. The other part of our project is working with speech engineers. I’m sure you’re familiar with Siri and Google, right.

Gretchen: I talk into the – they transcribe me, they understand me. But I notice even when I’m speaking French to them, which I don’t have a native French accent, they’re not very good at transcribing what I’m saying in a language that isn’t like the very Paris French that they’re trained on. I bet this happens with Singlish.

Fei Ting: It’s a challenge. It’s difficult in Singlish. It’s difficult when people switch between or among the languages so rapidly. We had a PhD student from the engineering department that was on this project, and he was looking at how do you do automatic language identification on the recordings that we collected because –

Gretchen: This could save you a lot of time if it works.

Fei Ting: If it works. But it’s also a really challenging problem. One, it’s that it’s not the standard variety and then the other thing is it’s child directed. They don’t have good solutions for child-directed speech yet.

Gretchen: Because people talk differently to children. They maybe use, depending on the language, like a broader range of pitches, or higher pitches, maybe they talk a bit slower, they have child-specific vocabulary, like this word for “pacifier” which has a lot of child-specific words in different languages or different varieties. This is not the kind of thing that language models are trained on. They’re training on journalists talking on the news in this very formal context.

Fei Ting: That’s right. Our PhD student has done really great work. We also work with our speech engineers at Johns Hopkins University. Whenever we have meetings with them, I tell them, “Oh, I’m so sorry for our” – our data set’s really problematic. I know that. I understand that. But they see it as a great challenge.

Gretchen: Right. And if all you’re doing is news stuff, it’s less interesting or relevant. Maybe it’s a problem, but maybe the algorithms that were not accounting for it are the problem.

Fei Ting: Exactly. Our language models are only as good as the data that we train them on. They all come with a certain set of biases.

Gretchen: Absolutely.

Fei Ting: Right now, the bias is non-child-directed language.

Gretchen: And non-Singaporean language.

Fei Ting: Non-Singaporean language. It’s been interesting just looking at our data from their point of view as well. There’s gonna be more and more reliance on AI in the future, for sure, not just for our line of work but just part of our day-to-day living. If AI is supposed to accommodate the natural languages of the world, then it should be able to do this.

Gretchen: And it should actually be trained on how people talk in multilingual environments. Fei Ting, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Fei Ting: Thanks for having me.

Gretchen: If you could leave people knowing one thing about linguistics, what would it be?

Fei Ting: I think it would be that there’s still a lot that we don’t know. I think the brain is a fascinating organ, and a lot of what we do know about what the brain does when it comes to language processing and language acquisition, we know it from a very monolingual English point of view. Most of the people around the world are non-monolingual speakers, and a lot of them don’t speak English, so if we wanna know how this organ that we have works when it comes to language acquisition and language processing, then we need more research on non-monolingual English-speaking populations.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, “Not Judging Your Grammar, Just Analysing It” stickers, IPA posters, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lauren tweets and blogs as Superlinguo. And our guest, Woon Fei Ting, can be found as @FeitingW on Twitter, and the lab is Facebook.com/bliplabntu. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes, and you wish there were more? You can get access to an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month plus our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Have you gotten really into linguistics, and you wish you had more people to talk with about it? Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans. Plus, all patrons help keep the show ad-free. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Fei Ting: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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