Network Model of Singlish Words
September 6, 2022
The English Language Institute of Singapore was set up on 6th September 2011 by Lee Kuan Yew, who held the position of Minister Mentor at the time. The institute was set up with the objective of raising English Language standards in the country and improving the quality of English Language education in our schools.
English is one of Singapore’s four official languages. It is used as the language of administration and the medium of instruction in schools here. Over time, English in Singapore has been localized, developing its own syntax and vocabulary items. Our use of English in Singapore has come into its own and is known as Singapore English.
Free association is a mental process where a particular word spontaneously suggests another word. The words do not need to have a logical connection between them. In psychology, free association investigates the strength of the relationship between two particular words in memory. We determine the strength of this relationship by examining how often participants within a sample produce a word as a free association response to another word.
Free association databases, repositories that detail the relationships between different words, have been developed for various languages. Singapore English, however, does not yet have such a database. Assistant Professor Cynthia Siew (NUS Department of Psychology) proposes a free association database for Singapore English. She asserts that the database is necessary because Singapore English contains unique vocabulary items that have unique relationships with typical English words. A free association database for Singapore English can accurately represent Singaporeans’ conceptual associations between Singapore English items and typical English words.
By collecting free association data from a sample representative of Singapore’s population and applying network analysis techniques, Dr. Siew aims to construct an overall association network structure for Singapore English that represents the complexity of the relationships between words in our lexicon. She contends that Singapore English’s association network can be compared with other association networks of English words and can be used to investigate differences in language use between younger and older generations in Singapore.
Funded by DSO National Laboratories, Dr. Siew’s project, Network Model of Singlish Words, aims to establish a free association database for Singapore English words. This database will be able to explain the differences between the language profiles of Singaporeans across different demographics and the relationship between Singapore English words and typical English words. The database also provides further research opportunities such as explaining how demographics affect language processing abilities in Singaporeans and detailing additional semantic properties of Singapore English words.