Rebecca L. Starr

Singapore Multilingual Corpus

The SMC is a project seeking to document and investigate the speech of multilinguals in Singapore, including speakers of Singapore's many heritage languages, such as Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, Hainanese, Kristang, Baba Malay, and others. Learn more about the project or sign up to participate here.

Voices of Children in Singapore

VOCS is a project I began in 2015 that explores the sociolinguistic development of Singaporean and 'expat' children growing up in Singapore. You can learn more about the English perception aspect of VOCS in our paper in Language in Society, and English acquisition patterns in my article in Language Variation and Change; a chapter on Mandarin acquisition and perception is in progress for an edited volume for John Benjamins.

Sociolinguistic variation in two-way language immersion

My book on children's sociolinguistic development in Mandarin-English two-way language immersion was published by Multilingual Matters in 2017. 

The book is based on year-long ethnography I conducted in an American primary school, focusing on how children learn about sociolinguistic variation within each language in a two-way immersion environment in which the teachers do not speak the varieties being targeted by the school. The book also includes an analysis of teacher variation across different classroom situations (e.g., scolding, admin, teaching), and takes a look at corrections in the classroom, including teachers correcting students, students correcting peers, and students correcting teachers. Overall, I demonstrate that children learning a second language in this environment can exploit metalinguistic information and patterns of sociolinguistic variation in their environment to target and acquire a more standard version of a language than that used by their teachers and native-speaker peers.

Other language variation and change projects

Read more about my work on:

• Perception and use of the BATH-TRAP merger in Singapore English (Journal of English Linguistics)

• English /r/ among Tamil Indian Singaporeans (World Englishes)

• Perception and production of the COT-CAUGHT-COURT merger in Singapore English  (slides)

• The NEXT-TEXT split in Singapore English (slides)

• Evidence for the prosodic structure of Japanese from variation in Japanese text-setting (Glossa)

• Variation in Korean argument realization by L3 learners (Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, International Journal of Multilingualism)

• Political identity and the pronunciation of "Iraq" (American Speech)

• Variation and change in the production and evaluation of Klingon on Star Trek (slides)

Suprasegmental features of ASMR

I have pursued a few projects related to the sociophonetics of the registers used by ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) performers. ASMR performance is an intriguing area of study for sociolinguists, because, as a newly-enregistered sensory experience, we can examine its social construction as it develops across communities and languages. The focus of ASMR on the experience of the human voice, and somatosensory reactions to the voice, also prompts us to reevaluate the extent to which the social meaning of the voice is a wholly ideological construct.

• The multimodal construction of affective stance among Chinese ASMR performers (Journal of Sociolinguistics) (slides)

• Cross-linguistic suprasegmental features of ASMR (slides)

Other voice quality and style projects

• The Japanese 'sweet voice' style and the construction of authenticity (Language in Society)

Discourse projects

Read more about my work on:

• Covid-19 themed advertising in Singapore and crisis commodification (Language in Society)

• Mandarin enrichment centers in Singapore (Multilingua)

Students

My PhD Students

• Mihi Park. “Third language acquisition among early bilinguals.” (2016) (Senior Lecturer, NUS Centre for Language Studies)

• Tianxiao Wang. “Sibling variation and family language policy among bilingual Chinese Singaporeans.” (2019) (Assistant Professor, Overseas Education College, Xiamen University)

• A. R. M. Mostafizar Rahman. “Ideological evaluation of linguistic hybridization and its consequences in Bangladesh.” (2020) (Professor, English, Khulna University)

• Evynurul Laily Zen. “Linguistic interference among simultaneous and sequential Javanese-Indonesian early bilinguals.” (current)

• Ghada Farag Sayed Soliman. “Language and the Arab Spring: Shifting norms of language use on Egyptian television amid socio-political instability and change.”  (current)

• Yunbo Mei. “Accent and identity among non-native speaker teachers of English in China.” (current)

• Jiajia Cai. "Bilingual development of children in Chaozhou." (current)

• Ruixue Wei. "Phonological variation in Mandarin Chinese and English among children of immigrants from China in Singapore." (current)

• Zichuan Yu. “Investigating the effects of Chinese dialects on L2 English acquisition: A variationist approach.” (current)

My MA Students

• Brinda Balasubramaniam. “Investigating the influence of Singapore’s language policies on family language policy among Tamil-Indian parents in Singapore.” (2019) (Teacher, Fairfield Methodist Secondary School)

• Rowland Anthony Imperial. “Speech production and sociolinguistic perception in a ‘non-native’ second language context: A sociophonetic study of Korean learners of English in the Philippines.” (2017) (DPhil, School of Education, Oxford University)

• Loo May Eng. “Language choice of Chinese migrants in Singapore.” (2016) (Research Analyst, Health Outcomes and Medical Education Research (HOMER), National Healthcare Group SG)