Lachham Singh
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 159483 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Lachham Singh |
| PRENOMES | Lachham |
| SOBRENOME | Singh |
| ASSINATURA | SINGH L |
| AFILIAÇÕES | National University of Singapore |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9423-4956 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 27 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 35 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 27 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2000 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Power, Privilege, and Positionality in Psychology Departments
Although academic departments and institutions frequently champion ideals of egalitarianism and inclusion, many are defined by status hierarchies that can undermine their stated commitment to these ideals. This article examines the distinct and interconnected influences of power, privilege, and positionality in the defense of progressive norms, with a particular focus on psychology departments as a context for epistemic and cultural analysis. Col…
Socioeconomic Status Predicts Infant Word Recognition
Prior research has demonstrated that infants have the capacity to recognize some familiar words. However, past studies have not analyzed the sociodemographic generalizability of research findings. In the current study, we examine word recognition in a linguistically, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse community sample. A community sample of Singaporean infants from diverse socioeconomic and linguistic backgrounds between 5 and 12 months of…
Ethical and epistemic costs of a lack of geographical and cultural diversity in developmental science
Increasing geographical and cultural diversity in research participation has been a key priority for psychological researchers. In this article, we track changes in participant diversity in developmental science over the past decade. These analyses reveal surprisingly modest shifts in global diversity of research participants over time, calling into question the generalizability of our empirical foundation. We provide examples from the study of e…
A unified approach to demographic data collection for research with young children across diverse cultures
Culture is a key determinant of children's development both in its own right and as a measure of generalizability of developmental phenomena. Studying the role of culture in development requires information about participants' demographic backgrounds. However, both reporting and treatment of demographic data are limited and inconsistent in child development research. A barrier to reporting demographic data in a consistent fashion is that no stand…
Words in context
Most words spoken to infants are produced in larger units, such as clauses, phrases, and sentences. As such, language learners must recognize words amidst the words that surround them. However, the phonetic forms of words change based on surrounding context. Here, we investigate the effects of a common source of phonetic change—phonological assimilation—on word recognition in English monolingual and English-Mandarin bilingual infants from Singapo…
Diversity and representation in infant research
Psychological researchers have become increasingly concerned with generalized accounts of human behavior based on narrow participant representation. This concern is particularly germane to infant research as findings from infant studies are often invoked to theorize broadly about the origins of human behavior. In this article, we examined participant diversity and representation in research published on infant development in four journals over th…
Effects of face masks on language comprehension in bilingual children
Due to the COVID‐19 pandemic, many children receive language input through face coverings. The impact of face coverings for children's abilities to understand language remains unclear. Past research with monolingual children suggests that hearing words through surgical masks does not disrupt word recognition, but hearing words through transparent face shields proves more challenging. In this study, we investigated effects of different face coveri…
The tone atlas of perceptual discriminability and perceptual distance
Some prior investigations suggest that tone perception is flexible, reasonably independent of native phonology, whereas others suggest it is constrained by native phonology. We address this issue in a systematic and comprehensive investigation of adult tone perception. Sampling from diverse tone and non-tone speaking communities, we tested discrimination of the three major tone systems (Cantonese, Thai, Mandarin) that dominate the tone perception…
Language acquisition in a multilingual society
In this study, infant vocabulary development was tracked in a multilingual society (Singapore) within a socioeconomically diverse sample. The sample comprised 1316 infants from 17.4 to 27.7 months (669 females, 647 males; 88% Chinese race, 4% Malay, 4% Indian, and 0.004% mixed-race [4% declined to provide race information]). Children varied in English language exposure and socioeconomic status. Analyses focused on identifying demographic predicto…
From information to action
Kidd and Garcia provide a critical analysis of linguistic representation in child language acquisition. Their findings expose a rich irony: a field of study for which diversity of experience is a basic assumption has remained non-diverse in its empirical and theoretical pursuits. In this commentary, I discuss deep-rooted structural factors that have contributed to Western dominance in child language acquisition research. Future progress relies on…
A Multilab Study of Bilingual Infants
From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet, IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multi-site study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants' IDS preference. As part of the …
Diversity and Representation in Infant Research
Diversity and Representation in Infant Research: Barriers and bridges towards a globalized science of infant development Leher Singh, Alejandrina Cristia, Lana B. Karasik, Sarah J. Rajendra, and Lisa M. Oakes Author NoteLeher Singh, Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, Singapore; Alejandrina Cristia, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Département d’Etudes Cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL University, …
The development of gaze following in monolingual and bilingual infants
Determining the meanings of words requires language learners to attend to what other people say. However, it behooves a young language learner to simultaneously encode relevant non‐verbal cues, for example, by following the direction of their eye gaze. Sensitivity to cues such as eye gaze might be particularly important for bilingual infants, as they encounter less consistency between words and objects than monolingual infants, and do not always …
Beyond perceptual narrowing
A significant body of literature has demonstrated that infants demonstrate a decline in sensitivity to nonnative sound contrasts by their first birthday, a transition often thought to be adaptive for later word learning. The present study investigated infants' sensitivity to these contrasts in a habituation-based discrimination and word learning task (total N = 168, 78 males and 90 females). All infants were native to Singapore and were of Chines…
A multi-lab study of bilingual infants
From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet, IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multi-site study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants’ IDS preference. As part of the …
Bilingualism is associated with less racial bias in preschool children
Bilingual children have been shown to differ from monolingual children in several domains of human cognition. Comparatively few studies have investigated social-interactional processes in bilingual populations. Here, we investigated whether monolingual and bilingual children demonstrate similar susceptibility to an aspect of social functioning with broad societal reach: racial bias. We measured both implicit and explicit biases against African ra…
Effects of age and bilingualism on sensitivity to native and nonnative tone variation
Most children learn a language such as Mandarin Chinese that uses lexical tone to communicate meaning. This study aimed to examine the phonological specificity of tone representations in monolingual and bilingual learners of Mandarin. Two age-groups were tested: toddlers (2.5 to 3.5 years) and preschoolers (4 to 5 years; N = 80). Using a preferential looking paradigm, children were presented with correct and mispronounced (Cantonese or Mandarin t…
Does infant speech perception predict later vocabulary development in bilingual infants
He said, she said
The purpose of the current study was to examine effects of bilingual language input on infant word segmentation and on talker generalization. In the present study, monolingually and bilingually exposed infants were compared on their abilities to recognize familiarized words in speech and to maintain generalizable representations of familiarized words. Words were first presented in the context of sentences to infants and then presented to infants …
Lexical tone variation and spoken word recognition in preschool children
Children undergo gradual progression in their ability to differentiate correct and incorrect pronunciations of words, a process that is crucial to establishing a native vocabulary. For the most part, the development of mature phonological representations has been researched by investigating children's sensitivity to consonant and vowel variation, with a much lesser focus on lexical tones. The current study investigates sensitivity to lexical tone…
Test–Retest Reliability in Infant Speech Perception Tasks
A long line of research investigates how infants learn the sounds and words in their ambient language over the first year of life, through behavioral tasks involving discrimination and recognition. More recently, individual performance in such tasks has been used to predict later language development. Does this mean that dependent measures in such tasks are reliable and can stably measure speech perception skills over short time spans? Our three …
Rise and fall
Influences of Infant‐Directed Speech on Early Word Recognition
When addressing infants, many adults adopt a particular type of speech, known as infant‐directed speech (IDS). IDS is characterized by exaggerated intonation, as well as reduced speech rate, shorter utterance duration, and grammatical simplification. It is commonly asserted that IDS serves in part to facilitate language learning. Although intuitively appealing, direct empirical tests of this claim are surprisingly scarce. Additionally, studies th…
Early Eocene Primates from Gujarat, India
Overcoming the Effects of Variation in Infant Speech Segmentation
Previous studies have shown that 7.5‐month‐olds can track and encode words in fluent speech, but they fail to equate instances of a word that contrast in talker gender, vocal affect, and fundamental frequency. By 10.5 months, they succeed at generalizing across such variability, marking a clear transition period during which infants' word recognition skills become qualitatively more mature. Here we explore the role of word familiarity in this cri…
Early Eocene Primates from Gujarat, India
Ethical and epistemic costs of a lack of geographical and cultural diversity in developmental science
Increasing geographical and cultural diversity in research participation has been a key priority for psychological researchers. In this article, we track changes in participant diversity in developmental science over the past decade. These analyses reveal surprisingly modest shifts in global diversity of research participants over time, calling into question the generalizability of our empirical foundation. We provide examples from the study of e…
A unified approach to demographic data collection for research with young children across diverse cultures
Culture is a key determinant of children's development both in its own right and as a measure of generalizability of developmental phenomena. Studying the role of culture in development requires information about participants' demographic backgrounds. However, both reporting and treatment of demographic data are limited and inconsistent in child development research. A barrier to reporting demographic data in a consistent fashion is that no stand…
Bilingualism is associated with less racial bias in preschool children
Bilingual children have been shown to differ from monolingual children in several domains of human cognition. Comparatively few studies have investigated social-interactional processes in bilingual populations. Here, we investigated whether monolingual and bilingual children demonstrate similar susceptibility to an aspect of social functioning with broad societal reach: racial bias. We measured both implicit and explicit biases against African ra…
Vocabulary growth in late talkers
Vocabulary growth from 2;0 to 3;0 was studied in 28 late talkers using expressive vocabulary inventories reported bimonthly on the Language Development Survey (LDS). Group milestones were 18 words at 2;0, 89 words at 2;6, and 195 words at 3;0. A sub-group of 11 children (Group 1) showed a rapid vocabulary spurt between 2;2 and 2;8, reached the 150–180 word mark by 2;6, and attained the LDS ceiling of about 300 words by 2;10. In contrast, the 17 c…
Infants' Listening Preferences
The most robust finding on infants' listening preferences has been widely characterized as a preference for baby talk (BT) over adult‐directed speech (ADS). Although prosodic modifications characteristic of BT also convey positive affect, differences in affect across BT and ADS speech registers have not been controlled in previous studies. This set of experiments sought to elucidate the basis for 6‐month‐olds' listening preference by independentl…
Overcoming the Effects of Variation in Infant Speech Segmentation
Previous studies have shown that 7.5‐month‐olds can track and encode words in fluent speech, but they fail to equate instances of a word that contrast in talker gender, vocal affect, and fundamental frequency. By 10.5 months, they succeed at generalizing across such variability, marking a clear transition period during which infants' word recognition skills become qualitatively more mature. Here we explore the role of word familiarity in this cri…
Influences of Infant‐Directed Speech on Early Word Recognition
When addressing infants, many adults adopt a particular type of speech, known as infant‐directed speech (IDS). IDS is characterized by exaggerated intonation, as well as reduced speech rate, shorter utterance duration, and grammatical simplification. It is commonly asserted that IDS serves in part to facilitate language learning. Although intuitively appealing, direct empirical tests of this claim are surprisingly scarce. Additionally, studies th…
Early Eocene Primates from Gujarat, India
Test–Retest Reliability in Infant Speech Perception Tasks
A long line of research investigates how infants learn the sounds and words in their ambient language over the first year of life, through behavioral tasks involving discrimination and recognition. More recently, individual performance in such tasks has been used to predict later language development. Does this mean that dependent measures in such tasks are reliable and can stably measure speech perception skills over short time spans? Our three …
Rise and fall
Lexical tone variation and spoken word recognition in preschool children
Children undergo gradual progression in their ability to differentiate correct and incorrect pronunciations of words, a process that is crucial to establishing a native vocabulary. For the most part, the development of mature phonological representations has been researched by investigating children's sensitivity to consonant and vowel variation, with a much lesser focus on lexical tones. The current study investigates sensitivity to lexical tone…
He said, she said
The purpose of the current study was to examine effects of bilingual language input on infant word segmentation and on talker generalization. In the present study, monolingually and bilingually exposed infants were compared on their abilities to recognize familiarized words in speech and to maintain generalizable representations of familiarized words. Words were first presented in the context of sentences to infants and then presented to infants …
Does infant speech perception predict later vocabulary development in bilingual infants
A multi-lab study of bilingual infants
From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet, IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multi-site study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants’ IDS preference. As part of the …
Bilingualism is associated with less racial bias in preschool children
Bilingual children have been shown to differ from monolingual children in several domains of human cognition. Comparatively few studies have investigated social-interactional processes in bilingual populations. Here, we investigated whether monolingual and bilingual children demonstrate similar susceptibility to an aspect of social functioning with broad societal reach: racial bias. We measured both implicit and explicit biases against African ra…
Effects of age and bilingualism on sensitivity to native and nonnative tone variation
Most children learn a language such as Mandarin Chinese that uses lexical tone to communicate meaning. This study aimed to examine the phonological specificity of tone representations in monolingual and bilingual learners of Mandarin. Two age-groups were tested: toddlers (2.5 to 3.5 years) and preschoolers (4 to 5 years; N = 80). Using a preferential looking paradigm, children were presented with correct and mispronounced (Cantonese or Mandarin t…
A Multilab Study of Bilingual Infants
From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet, IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multi-site study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants' IDS preference. As part of the …
Diversity and Representation in Infant Research
Diversity and Representation in Infant Research: Barriers and bridges towards a globalized science of infant development Leher Singh, Alejandrina Cristia, Lana B. Karasik, Sarah J. Rajendra, and Lisa M. Oakes Author NoteLeher Singh, Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, Singapore; Alejandrina Cristia, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Département d’Etudes Cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL University, …
The development of gaze following in monolingual and bilingual infants
Determining the meanings of words requires language learners to attend to what other people say. However, it behooves a young language learner to simultaneously encode relevant non‐verbal cues, for example, by following the direction of their eye gaze. Sensitivity to cues such as eye gaze might be particularly important for bilingual infants, as they encounter less consistency between words and objects than monolingual infants, and do not always …
Beyond perceptual narrowing
A significant body of literature has demonstrated that infants demonstrate a decline in sensitivity to nonnative sound contrasts by their first birthday, a transition often thought to be adaptive for later word learning. The present study investigated infants' sensitivity to these contrasts in a habituation-based discrimination and word learning task (total N = 168, 78 males and 90 females). All infants were native to Singapore and were of Chines…
The tone atlas of perceptual discriminability and perceptual distance
Some prior investigations suggest that tone perception is flexible, reasonably independent of native phonology, whereas others suggest it is constrained by native phonology. We address this issue in a systematic and comprehensive investigation of adult tone perception. Sampling from diverse tone and non-tone speaking communities, we tested discrimination of the three major tone systems (Cantonese, Thai, Mandarin) that dominate the tone perception…
Language acquisition in a multilingual society
In this study, infant vocabulary development was tracked in a multilingual society (Singapore) within a socioeconomically diverse sample. The sample comprised 1316 infants from 17.4 to 27.7 months (669 females, 647 males; 88% Chinese race, 4% Malay, 4% Indian, and 0.004% mixed-race [4% declined to provide race information]). Children varied in English language exposure and socioeconomic status. Analyses focused on identifying demographic predicto…
From information to action
Kidd and Garcia provide a critical analysis of linguistic representation in child language acquisition. Their findings expose a rich irony: a field of study for which diversity of experience is a basic assumption has remained non-diverse in its empirical and theoretical pursuits. In this commentary, I discuss deep-rooted structural factors that have contributed to Western dominance in child language acquisition research. Future progress relies on…
Words in context
Most words spoken to infants are produced in larger units, such as clauses, phrases, and sentences. As such, language learners must recognize words amidst the words that surround them. However, the phonetic forms of words change based on surrounding context. Here, we investigate the effects of a common source of phonetic change—phonological assimilation—on word recognition in English monolingual and English-Mandarin bilingual infants from Singapo…
Diversity and representation in infant research
Psychological researchers have become increasingly concerned with generalized accounts of human behavior based on narrow participant representation. This concern is particularly germane to infant research as findings from infant studies are often invoked to theorize broadly about the origins of human behavior. In this article, we examined participant diversity and representation in research published on infant development in four journals over th…
Effects of face masks on language comprehension in bilingual children
Due to the COVID‐19 pandemic, many children receive language input through face coverings. The impact of face coverings for children's abilities to understand language remains unclear. Past research with monolingual children suggests that hearing words through surgical masks does not disrupt word recognition, but hearing words through transparent face shields proves more challenging. In this study, we investigated effects of different face coveri…
A unified approach to demographic data collection for research with young children across diverse cultures
Culture is a key determinant of children's development both in its own right and as a measure of generalizability of developmental phenomena. Studying the role of culture in development requires information about participants' demographic backgrounds. However, both reporting and treatment of demographic data are limited and inconsistent in child development research. A barrier to reporting demographic data in a consistent fashion is that no stand…
Socioeconomic Status Predicts Infant Word Recognition
Prior research has demonstrated that infants have the capacity to recognize some familiar words. However, past studies have not analyzed the sociodemographic generalizability of research findings. In the current study, we examine word recognition in a linguistically, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse community sample. A community sample of Singaporean infants from diverse socioeconomic and linguistic backgrounds between 5 and 12 months of…
Psychology (25 obras) · Language Development and Disorders (18 obras) · Linguistics (18 obras) · Developmental psychology (16 obras) · Reading and Literacy Development (12 obras) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (10 obras) · Cognitive psychology (8 obras) · Sociology (8 obras) · Child and Animal Learning Development (7 obras) · Mandarin Chinese (7 obras)