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Tuning in to Cantonese: HKU Speech, Language and Reading Lab is recruiting 0- to 12-months-old native Cantonese babies

12 Mar 2018

The Speech, Language and Reading Lab of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) is looking for Cantonese newborns (between 0-12 months old) for a research project on the speech development of local Cantonese babies. The project is part of an international collaboration with Dr. Reiko Mazuka who currently works in the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan, and involves babies from four different regions: Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and Thailand. By comparing infants from these four Asian language-speaking regions, the project aims to explore when and how Asian infants learn to differentiate their native language system from other languages.

Participants should meet the following criteria:

• Newborns younger than 12 months old;
• Newborns who are exposed to Cantonese as their native language

Every new parent wishes her or his baby will have a great and healthy start on life’s amazing journey. Parents expect their babies to be good listeners, talkers, and readers. The question of how little babies start tuning in to their native languages and learning specific speech-sound patterns remain.

Two decades of infant speech perception research suggests that the interaction between parents and infants plays a key role in language acquisition, because infants are actively attending to surrounding sounds and learning their language mainly from parents and/or caregivers before they learn to speak. Moreover, although newborns are able to distinguish a variety of sounds, between 8 to 10 months of age, infants’ sensitivity to native speech sounds increases while sensitivity to nonnative sounds decreases.

These findings are largely based on studies of Western infants who have been exposed to alphabetic languages. Given the striking differences between alphabetic and nonalphabetic languages, such as English and Cantonese, it is critically important to explore the developmental routes of speech perception in local Hong Kong Cantonese babies. Doing so can advance parents’ understanding of the developmental trajectory of Cantonese language acquisition and provide better support to their babies’ language learning. 

The recruitment period is from now to March 10, 2019. All tasks in the project will be conducted by a well-trained experimenter, and the infant will be accompanied by the parent/caregiver throughout the experiment. The study will have no negative effects on the infant.

Upon completion of the testing, parents/caregivers of participants will:

• Receive a $100HKD book coupon and certificate as tokens of appreciation;
• Be invited to join our FREE parent workshop;
• Learn more about infant language development/acquisition, which will help with the future educational plan of the child

For participation enquiries, please contact:
Miss Cecilia Fung, Speech, Language and Reading Lab, HKU (Tel: 2241 5984/ Email: slrlab.infant@gmail.com or fill in the online registration at https://goo.gl/forms.

About the Speech, Language and Reading Lab
The Speech, Language and Reading Lab is directed by Dr. Shelley Xiuli Tong. The lab’s research unifies three psycholinguistic areas: speech perception and production, language learning, and reading acquisition. These three avenues of research involve bilingual children, children with developmental dyslexia, children with autistic spectrum disorders, and children with reading comprehension difficulties. Our research projects focus on (1) understanding the mechanism that enables children to crack suprasegmental speech and orthographic codes in two different languages to formulate speech-print associations in the process of becoming biliterate; (2) uncovering the links between oral language skills and literacy outcomes; and (3) promoting an integration of speech-language-literacy in clinical and educational practice for bilingual children. We aim to understand the basic prerequisite skills underlying rapid language and literacy acquisition, and to further explore specific language and literacy disorders at the cognitive, linguistic, and social-behavioural levels.

Please visit: http://slrlab.wixsite.com/slrlab for details.