The roles of education, age of child, and perceptions towards the importance of personal expression through language in the production of Singlish discourse markers from parents to children

• Main Author: Ho, Eze Ee Jie
• Other Authors: Suzy Styles
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Social sciences::Psychology; Humanities::Linguistics::Psycholinguistics
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/172846
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Singlish discourse markers are small words that Singaporean speakers use to perform specific functions in an utterance, such as denoting a speaker's attitude, epistemic stance or emotions. However, while researchers have conducted observational research between demographic variables such as ethnicity and discourse marker use, other demographic variables such as educational or socioeconomic status have not been investigated, and existing observational research has been conducted in a context-free environment. In particular, the context of child-directed speech has not been investigated despite its importance in a child’s cognitive and linguistic development. To investigate differences in Singlish discourse marker use in child-directed speech (as exploratory research) and any relationships between the rate of discourse markers produced, age of child, educational status and parents' belief of the importance of personal expression through language, a corpus of picture-book activity recordings was analysed through statistical and conversation analysis. While no significant relationships between educational level, age of child, parents’ belief of the importance of personal expression and the rate of discourse markers produced, the study has found differences in the distributions of Singlish discourse marker use between this corpus and a corpus of everyday Singlish conversation and the function of certain Singlish discourse markers. In particular, “lah” was underrepresented and “orh” and “hor” were overrepresented in the distribution compared to a corpus of conversations among Singaporean adult speakers, and “leh” has a function that is closer to “lah” in informal Singlish contexts between adult speakers. Limitations and implications of these findings and future directions investigating the use of Singlish discourse markers in child-directed speech are discussed.