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RESEARCH
STUDENTS
1. LEE Lay Choo (full-time M.Soc.Sci with NUS Scholarship, October
1997 – September 2000, currently revising thesis for re-examination)
Development of literacy skills in the Malay Language
Lay Choo is a trilingual (Mandarin-Malay-English) Malaysian citizen who is
interested in a career in educational psychology. For her Masters research
she has been comparing the development of literacy skills in the Malay
language by first language Malay children (ethnic Malays) and first language
Mandarin children (ethnic Chinese) who are attending schools in Taiping,
Perak.
2. Olivia WEE (full-time M.Soc Sci with NUS Studentship, July 1999 –
June 2002)
Cognitive processing of Chinese character sub-components
Olivia is using the visual search paradigm to look at skilled reading of
Chinese characters, specifically the interplay of orthography and phonology.
She was employed as an RA on RP under the FASS Research Augmentation Scheme,
and the heartening results with led her to make a series of hypotheses about
the processing of character subcomponents (between the stroke and radical
level). This is innovative work and requires a special psycholinguistic
database of subcomponent frequencies and regularities to be established.
3. Wendy THAM (M.Soc. Sci with NUS Scholarship, July 1999 – June
2002)
Cognitive neuropsychology of Chinese –English bilingual biscriptals
Wendy is interested in the interface between clinical psychology,
experimental psychology and cognitive neuropsychology. At the level of
orthography, phonology and semantics, she is trying to establish which
laboratory paradigms from cognitive experimental psychology are reliable
across brain-damaged dysphasics undergoing fMRI scans at Singapore General
Hospital. Wendy is now writing up her thesis.
4. TYE Wuey Ping (M.Soc. Sci with NUS Scholarship, July 1999 – June
2002)
Language assessments for Malay-speaking dysphasic adults in Malaysia
Wuey Ping graduated from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia’s Speech and
Language degree program. She was keen to strengthen her research skills by
exploring the cognitive processing of Standard Malay speakers who have
sustained brain injuries. Wuey Ping presented her data at a specialist
conference in Australia in July 2001, and she is now working on the first
draft of her thesis.
5. Mandy PHUA (M.Soc. Sci student with NUS Scholarship, Aug 1999 –
July 2002)
Sign languages and literacy skills of Singapore hearing-impaired children
Mandy is looking at the nature of the sign language (high and low forms)
used by the deaf community in Singapore. She is particularly interested in
the acquisition of literacy skills because a disproportionate number of
hearing-impaired children fail PSLE. Quality research of this kind in a
multilingual community is very rare. Mandy has finalized data analysis and
is now writing up.
6. Zhang Qingjun (full-time Masters with NUS Scholarship, Jan 1999 –
Dec 2001)
Neural network model of skilled reading in English
Zhang is a PRC scholar working under the supervision of Dr Leow Wee Kheng
and A/P Tan Chew Lim, NUS School of Computing. My task is to ensure his
programming is in keeping with current models of language processing in the
psycholinguistic literature. Zhang has already developed a basic model and
has tested it with a database that I helped to develop. He is now writing up
his thesis.
7. Christine Brebner (part-time Masters, Flinders University,
Australia)
Development of culturally appropriate language assessment tools in
English
Chris qualified as a speech and language therapist at Flinders but she has
worked with children in Singapore for several years and is very sensitive to
language differences. The lack of appropriate assessment tools for children
who speak colloquial Singapore English inspired Chris to hone her research
skills through a postgraduate degree with Dr Paul McCormack as her main
supervisor. She has designed a culturally appropriate picture description
test, and is now in the process of collecting data on K1 children. This will
facilitate more reliable identification and effective rehabilitation of
language impairment in local bilingual. Chris is extremely resourceful, and
she provides an essential link with clinical work in the field. She has
presented her work at two conferences in Australia, and regularly
contributes to workshops in Singapore.
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