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Introduction
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August 2008 - June 2012
Publications
Publications (83)
Phoneme identification is critically involved in alphabetic reading, and weak skills in phoneme perception are known to correspond to the development of reading skills in children around the age of reading instruction. However, current models of phoneme perception have been established in monolingual populations, and these relationships may not hol...
Background
Accumulating evidence shows that the home literacy environment (HLE) has a potent and early influence on children's language and literacy development. However, there is a more limited understanding of HLE and its contribution to children's outcomes for simultaneous bilingual children exposed to two languages at home, particularly in the...
Reading is a culturally acquired skill that is foundational to academic and personal growth. Unlike oral language skills, reading must be acquired through education. It is generally regarded that multiple cognitive, perceptual, and linguistic skills contribute to the process of reading, and this process, therefore, draws on multiple neurobiological...
Adult perception of voice onset time (VOT) for early bilinguals of English and Mandarin shows a mix of language-specific features (VOT boundary) and features shared across both languages (shared slope predicted by the individual’s childhood language exposure). To understand the development of this pattern, 81 English-Mandarin bilingual children in...
This article presents CPB-LEX, a large-scale database of lexical statistics derived from children’s picture books (age range 0–8 years). Such a database is essential for research in psychology, education and computational modelling, where rich details on the vocabulary of early print exposure are required. CPB-LEX was built through an innovative me...
Within the field of learning disabilities many intervention studies find that treatment resisters remain despite gains in our understanding of best practices and effective treatment for reading development and disability. In this study we examine good vs. poor responders in an intervention study with 147 early primary grade students in a learning s...
Research on orthographic consistency in English words has selectively identified different sub-syllabic units in isolation (grapheme, onset, vowel, coda, rime), yet there is no comprehensive assessment of how these measures affect word identification when taken together. To study which aspects of consistency are more psychologically relevant, we in...
This study examined the within- and cross-language relationships between intrinsic language learning motivation, home literacy environment (shared book reading, parental literacy involvement, and parent perceived child literacy interest), and receptive vocabulary in 185 bilingual preschoolers and 233 primary school children in Singapore. Age differ...
We investigated a technology-based tool for teaching English letter-sound correspondences with bilingual children learning phonologically and typologically distant languages: English and Chinese. We expect that learning about print at the phoneme level may be particularly challenging, given children’s experience with the morphosyllabic language of...
Research on orthographic consistency in English words has selectively identified different sub-syllabic units in isolation (grapheme, onset, vowel, coda, rime), yet there is no comprehensive assessment of how these measures affect word identification when taken together. To study which aspects of consistency are more psychologically relevant, we in...
Education and well-being care are important throughout life, but especially so during early childhood, a time characterized by profound neural change. Importantly, early life experiences and neurodevelopment, in turn, lay the foundation for the subsequent ways in which neurodevelopment unfolds. As neurodevelopment is influenced by both genetic and...
In this public-friendly report, we present general findings about the reading habits of Singaporean primary school bilingual children based on survey data (n=4326) collected between July and August 2020 and focus group discussions (n=72) conducted in September and November 2020. It contains tips on how to build a bilingual reading culture in school...
Introduction
The observed variability in the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is influenced by the amount of current reaching the targeted region-of-interest (ROI). Age and sex might affect current density at target ROI due to their impact on cortical anatomy. The present tDCS simulation study investigates the effects of co...
Local Research Synthesis
O’Brien, B. A., Sun, H., Sun, B., Chua, D., & Ow, R. L. (2021). Local evidence synthesis on language learning and bilingualism. Singapore: Office of Education Research, National Institute of Education.
Research on factors that impact preschoolers’ learning outcomes in Singapore points at a relation between early childhood learning and later school success. These factors are especially interesting in a multilingual context, with a bilingual education policy, such as Singapore, which offers a unique perspective on the complexities of fostering chil...
Long-term school absences during pandemic lockdowns may result in learning gains and losses much like the summer reading loss, but little is known about the actual effects of such lockdowns. This mixed-methods study examined changes in reading enjoyment, amount and resources in three groups of bilingual children – English-Chinese, English-Malay and...
New research suggests that mechanisms involved in fine motor skills play an important role in reading and writing development. Extending past work that focused on fine motor skills measured in adolescence, the present study followed children longitudinally from ages 5 to 7 to examine early literacy and associated sets of fine motor skills, includin...
Diglossia involves a linguistic state with different spoken dialects and literary forms. Cases of ‘modern diglossia’ consist of speech communities that encompass a local identity through the spoken dialect, and a cultural identity through an ancestral or neighboring countries’ standard written form. Two speech communities within Singapore closely f...
Phoneme perception is critically involved in alphabetic reading, however current findings may not hold for bilinguals. In the CROWN Game, children hear tokens of familiar words across a voice-onset time continuum (-60ms to 90ms). We measured individual VOT threshold and the slope of the transition between categories in 138 English/Chinese speaking...
Phonological perception develops with linguistic experience (Kuhl, 2004). However, there is limited knowledge about how children growing up in the presence of two-or-more linguistic systems resolve their categories into a mature system. We evaluated the maturity of multilingual Singaporean children’s categorical perception for English, as measured...
Prior to formal instruction, children gain experiences within the home environment that contribute to their school readiness. The home literacy environment (HLE) has garnered much interest as an established contributor to child language and literacy development and academic achievement. While models of HLE are mostly produced from Western cultures,...
Show-and-Tell is one of many activities recommended for encouraging children's oral language production in classrooms across the world, but there is little research on the topic. From existing studies, teacher facilitation is posited as key to shaping children's oral language production. This paper explores teacher strategies for facilitating child...
Introduction:
tDCS can modulate reading which is processed by lexical (ventral) and sub-lexical (dorsal) pathways. Previous research indicates that pathway recruitment in bilinguals depends on a script's orthographic depth and a reader's proficiency with it. The effect of tDCS on each reading pathway has not been investigated in bilinguals. We sti...
Reading and writing skills are intricately associated, and their mutual influence is seen as a dynamic process during literacy development for English. However, a broader understanding of the cross-domain development of literacy would be gained by examining literacy acquisition across different languages and scripts. An advantageous approach is to...
Increasing evidence suggests that language switching is a distinct form of bilingual language control that engages cognitive control. The most relevant and widely discussed framework is the Adaptive Control Hypothesis. This theoretical framework identifies language switching to be a key aspect of bilingual language control. It proposes that bilingu...
The diverse language profiles of learners have posed a critical challenge for education in many multilingual societies. Here we proposed a systematic research framework to address this issue. Within this framework, we reviewed and summarized the findings from several of our studies that examined the impact of bilingualism on teaching and learning i...
Teacher-child interactions are an integral factor influencing the quality of early childhood education, and multilingualism is increasingly prevalent in many contexts. In the multilingual society of Singapore this is particularly relevant because early childhood classrooms follow a bilingual policy and include the teaching and learning of Mother To...
The importance of literacy in academics and the predominantly digital world cannot be understated. The literacy component of writing is less researched than that of reading, even though it holds equal significance for modern success. Spelling is an important aspect of the construct of literacy, and is more difficult to acquire than reading. Previou...
Child characteristics, family factors, and preschool factors are all found to affect the rate of bilingual children's vocabulary development in heritage language (HL). However, what remains unknown is the relative importance of these three sets of factors in HL vocabulary growth. The current study explored the complex issue with 457 Singaporean pre...
It is widely held that children implicitly learn the structure of their writing system through statistical learning of spelling-to-sound mappings. Yet an unresolved question is how to sequence reading experience so that children can ‘pick up’ the structure optimally. We tackle this question here using a computational model of encoding and decoding....
Technology plays an increasingly important role in educational practice, including interventions for struggling learners (Torgesen et al., 2010; de Souza et al., 2018). This study focuses on the efficacy of tablet-based applications (see Word Reading, Grapholearn, and an experimental word-level program) for the purpose of supplementing early Englis...
Grade 1 responders and non-responders to an iPad-based reading intervention were evaluated on their cognitive attributes. Cognitive measures included phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, verbal memory and statistical learning, which were correlated with a lack of response to reading interventions in previous studies (Al Otaiba & Fuchs,...
To code-switch or not to code-switch? This is a dilemma for many bilingual language teachers. In this study, the influence of teachers' CS on bilingual children's language and cognitive development is explored within heritage language (HL) classes in Singapore. Specifically, the relationship between children's language output, vocabulary developmen...
Technology plays an increasingly important role in educational practice (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015) and while it may not supplant teacher-child interactions, technology use for teaching literacy is beneficial for struggling readers (e.g., Torgesen et al., 2010). While the majority of research on language intervention has been concerned with improvin...
Phonological awareness is critical for early reading acquisition across alphabetic as well as non-alphabetic languages. The grain size of phonological awareness varies with oral language structure and written orthography across languages. Phonological awareness’ grain size and contribution to reading for simultaneous biliterate children is currentl...
Research is limited for the development of reading and writing skills for the Tamil language. While the Tamil script is considered consistent for the reading direction, there are inconsistencies in the writing direction. For example, phonemic elements may be spelled in a different order than they are spoken (ளெ) (Padakannya, 2013). Also, some phone...
Cross-language effects on reading and spelling skills are of particular interest in bilingual children. Although there is an extensive literature on cross-language effects of reading in general (Fowler et al., 2008), research focusing on the developmental trajectory of reading and spelling skills in bilingual children longitudinally is limited.
This study identified robust predictors of expressive skills in academic English as a foreign language. The participants were 92 Korean-speaking learners of English. The field test of the Pearson Test of English Academic was used as a secondary data analysis. Four communicative skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) and six enabling lin...
Both internal factors (e.g., nonverbal intelligence) and external factors (e.g., input quantity) are claimed to affect the rate of children's vocabulary development. However, it remains an open question whether these variables work similarly on bilingual children's dual language learning. The current paper examined this issue on 805 Singapore child...
There has been increased interest in examining the relationship between different linguistic modules in second language learners’ grammar system. One such interface concerns learners’ ability to map morphosyntax to target-like semantic interpretations, especially in cases where the rst and second languages differ in morphosyntax-semantics mapping....
Given recent interest in interface properties in bilingual acquisition, this study examined Chinese-English adolescent bilinguals' acquisition of English telicity – a property whose semantic interpretation (aspectual completion versus incompletion) is influenced by morphosyntax (mass/count distinction). Differences between Chinese and English exist...
This paper focuses on reading fluency by bilingual primary school students, and the relation of text fluency to their reading comprehension. Group differences were examined in a cross-sectional design across the age range when fluency is posed to shift from word-level to text-level. One hundred five bilingual children from primary grades 3, 4, and...
Advances in neuroimaging techniques and analytic methods have led to a proliferation of studies investigating the impact of bilingualism on the cognitive and brain systems in humans. Lately, these findings have attracted much interest and debate in the field, leading to a number of recent commentaries and reviews. Here, we contribute to the ongoing...
The present study investigates the relation between the
reading process and text comprehension during naturalistic
text reading. To that end, participants read easy and difficult
texts while their eye movements were recorded. After each
reading, participants filled-in comprehension questionnaires.
We investigated classical measures of the reading p...
Concept-based teaching (CBT) has been found to better facilitate students' meaningful learning than traditional pedagogy, but little research has been conducted in nursing education.
This mixed-methods study investigated meaningful learning in nursing students. Quantitative data were extracted from archived records and analyzed through multiple reg...
Novice nurses' inability to transfer classroom knowledge to the bedside has been implicated in adverse patient outcomes, including death. Concept-based teaching is a pedagogy found to improve knowledge transfer. Concept-based teaching emanates from a constructivist paradigm of teaching and learning and can be implemented most effectively when the u...
Reading speed is commonly used as an index of reading fluency. However, reading speed is not a consistent predictor of text comprehension, when speed and comprehension are measured on the same text within the same reader. This might be due to the somewhat ambiguous nature of reading speed, which is sometimes regarded as a feature of the reading pro...
Reading typically undergoes a qualitative shift around Grade 4, becoming more fluent and silent, but there is no established measure for fluency in children’s silent reading. The present study presents a measure of self-paced reading in children, examining the use of complexity measures for time-series analyses recently established with adults. Cro...
The study of how words are represented and processed in the mind has served as a meeting ground for research in psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. Right now, this domain of study is in the midst of astonishing developments. At the core of these developments are the methodological and analytic advancements that have enabled researchers to ad...
Research on reading fluency in bilingual individuals is scarce, and there are issues with the way text reading fluency itself is operationalized and assessed. In this study new methods of assessing silent reading fluency using complexity metrics were examined for English language within the Singaporean bilingual context. A story reading task was gi...
The developmental sequence of the types of orthographic knowledge that children acquire early in reading development is unclear. Following findings of skilled reading, the orthographic constraints of positional frequency and feedback consistency were explored with a wordlikeness judgement task for grades 1–3 English-speaking children. The data prov...
Insufficient knowledge of the subtle relations between words' spellings and their phonology is widely held to be the primary limitation in developmental dyslexia. In the present study the influence of phonology on a semantic-based reading task was compared for groups of readers with and without dyslexia. As many studies have shown, skilled readers...
Long‐standing issues with the conceptualization, identification and subtyping of developmental dyslexia persist. This study takes an alternative approach to examine the heterogeneity of developmental dyslexia using taxometric classification techniques. These methods were used with a large sample of 671 children ages 6–8 who were diagnosed with seve...
Research Findings: This article describes major theories and research on math cognition across the fields of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and education and connects these literatures to intervention practices. Commercially available math intervention programs were identified and evaluated using the following questions: (a) Did neuroscience r...
Reading fluency beyond decoding is a limitation to many children with developmental reading disorders. In the interest of
remediating dysfluency, contributing factors need to be explored and understood in a developmental framework. The focus of
this study is orthographic processing in developmental dyslexia, and how it may contribute to reading flu...
This study examined the relative contributions of phonological awareness, orthographic pattern recognition, and rapid letter
naming to fluent word and connected-text reading within a dyslexic sample of 123 children in second and third grades. Participants
were assessed on a variety of fluency measures and reading subskills. Correlations and hierarc...
This article details a study which predicted that across a wide range of print sizes dyslexic reading would follow the same curve shape as skilled reading, with constant reading rates across large print sizes and a sharp decline in reading rates below a critical print size. It also predicted that dyslexic readers would require larger critical print...
Contrast coding has been reported to differ between dyslexic and normal readers. Dyslexic readers require higher levels of contrast to detect sinewave gratings for certain spatiotemporal conditions, and dyslexic readers show faster visual search at low contrast. We investigated whether these differences in early contrast coding generalize to readin...
Past research has shown that interpersonal interactions are characterized by a tacit coordination of motor movements of the participants and has suggested that the emergent synchrony might be explained by a coupled oscillator dynamic. This study investigates whether unintended between-person coordination can be demonstrated in a laboratory task tha...
Past research has shown that interpersonal interactions are characterized by a tacit coordination of motor movements of the participants and has suggested that the emergent synchrony might be explained by a coupled oscillator dynamic. This study investigates whether unintended between-person coordination can be demonstrated in a laboratory task tha...
Disrupted smooth pursuit eye tracking characterizes a greater proportion of individuals with schizophrenia than in the normal population. The finding of a similar increased incidence of eye tracking abnormality in first degree relatives of schizophrenics implicates this disorder as a potential biological marker for schizophrenia. To test the assump...
Discusses the effects of insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) on cognitive and academic functioning in children. IDDM children may have lower intellectual functioning, but their performance is usually average. Early age of disease onset, severe hypoglycemia, and diabetic ketoacidosis are the disease risk factors for lower IQ scores. Boys with...
This paper Presents a dynamical perspective on the study of interpersonal coordination found in both sport and non-sport activities. What self-organizing processes are, and how they can be modeled is first presented in the context of modeling entrainment phenomena. Evidence is then considered for self-organizing entrainment in interpersonal coordin...
