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?

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

Singapore is a small city-state nation with four official languages: English, Mandarin, Tamil, and Malay. Most Singaporeans can also speak a local hybrid variety known as Singlish, which arose from this highly multilingual environment to create something unique to the island. An important part of growing up in Singapore is learning which of your language skills to use in which situation.

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how kids learn language in Singapore 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. We talk about how the rich multilingual environment in Singapore led Fei Ting and the lab to do language documentation while trying to figure out how kids learn to talk in Singapore, creating a dictionary of Red Dot Baby Talk (named after how Singapore looks like a red dot on the world map). We also talk about Singlish more generally, some words that Gretchen has learned on her trip, doing research with kids and parents via Zoom, and the role of a lab manager and other lab members in doing linguistic research.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:
Our liveshow is in just a few days!! Gretchen will be chatting to Dr Kirby Conrod (from our episode about the grammar of singular they) about language and gender on February 18th (Canada) slash 19th (Australia)! You can find out what time that is for you here. This liveshow is for Lingthusiam patrons and will take place on the Lingthusiasm Discord server. Become a patron before the event to ask us questions in advance or live-react in the text chat. This episode will also be available as an edited-for-legibility recording in your usual Patreon live feed if you prefer to listen at a later date. In the meantime: ask us questions about gender or tell us about your favourite examples of gender in various languages and we might include them in the show!

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about what we’ve been up to in 2022 and what’s coming up for 2023. We also talk about our favourite linguistics paper that we read in 2022 slash possibly ever: okay, yes, academic papers don’t typically do this, but this paper has spoilers, so we STRONGLY recommend reading it yourself here before listening to this episode, or check out the sample paragraph on the Patreon post. Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, as well as access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds, and get access to this weekends liveshow!

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• Woon Fei Ting on Twitter
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles’, the prof whose lab Fei Ting works in
• BLIP lab at NTU on Facebook
• ‘Creating a Corpus of Multilingual Parent-Child Speech Remotely: Lessons Learned in a Large-Scale Onscreen Picturebook Sharing Task’ by Woon Fei Ting et al
• BLIP lab’s transcription protocol and FAQ
• ‘Little Orangutan: What a Scary Storm!’ Wordless picture book by Suzy Styles
• ‘Spiaking Singlish: A Companion to how Singaporeans communicate’ by Gwee Li Sui
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Theory of Mind’

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).