Dr He Sun Published a Paper in Applied Psycholinguistics

Date
Friday, 08 December 2017

Dr He Sun, Dr Bin Yin, Nur Farina Begum Binte Amsah and Dr Beth O'Brien published a paper “Differential effects of internal and external factors in early bilingual vocabulary learning: the case of Singapore” in the journal of Applied Psycholinguistics. 

The paper looks at how a bilingual society like Singapore, where there is an inclination for the use of English at home, results in a discrepancy of input between English and ethnic languages at home. In addition, both internal factors (e.g., nonverbal intelligence) and external factors (e.g., input quantity) are claimed to have an effect on the rate of children's acquisition of vocabulary. Whether these variables work similarly on bilingual children's dual language learning is examined. This study looked at both sets of factors on these children; that is, learning English in an input-rich setting, as well as learning their ethnic language in a comparatively input-poor setting.

While both sets of factors explained lexical knowledge in each language, the relative contribution is different for English and ethnic languages: internal factors explained more variance in English language vocabulary, whereas external factors were more important in explaining ethnic language knowledge. 

The project from which this paper arose is OER project “Singapore Kindergarten Impact Project (SKIP)”.

NIE staff/students can access the journal for free through the LIBRIS portal at https://login.libproxy.nie.edu.sg/login.

Dr Sun's poster presentation at Lyon, France in July 2017

She also made a poster presentation on 19th July at the 14th International Congress for the Study of Child Language at Lyon, France in July 2017.

In addition, Dr Sun presented two posters on 6th and 8th April at the Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting at Austin, USA in April 2017.