Preregistration for 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

Discourse markers (or discourse particles) are small words that perform pragmatic functions in an utterance (Wee, 2004). For example, it could denote a speaker’s attitude (e.g. “leh” for impatience in Singlish), to express emotion (“sia” for relief in Singlish), or to express certain types of epistemic modalities (certain uses of “ah” in Singlish) (Aijmer & Simon-Vandenbergen, 2003; Lim, 2007). In the context of Singlish (or Singaporean Colloquial English), discourse markers are widely used and are considered “critical identifiers” of this specific variety of English by both researchers of Singlish and users of Singlish (Smakman & Wagenaar, 2013). Due to the frequent use of discourse markers in Singlish and its multifaceted usability, exploring Singlish discourse markers would be useful in understanding the culture of Singlish speakers in general. While there has been research conducted regarding the use of Singlish discourse markers (for example, Leimgruber et al. (2021) investigated the relationship between gender, ethnicity and Singlish discourse marker use) and the perceptions of Singlish among Singaporeans in general, most investigations of Singlish discourse marker use have been conducted on isolated linguistic tokens (i.e., decontextualized usage). Conversely, there is currently no existing literature investigating relationships between demographic variables such as years of education in the context of a parent-child activity. This study aims to explore the potential relationships between the frequency of Singlish discourse markers produced in a parent-child book reading activity, the parent’s education level, the age of child and parents’ perceptions of the importance of ‘personal expression’ through language. This study will be conducted on data collected in T1 of the Talk Together Study conducted by the BLIP Lab at NTU under the supervision of PI Suzy J Styles. In this context words, expressions and linguistic structures from Singlish are also known as 'red dot' features of language.