Faculty Interview by Graduate Student: Interview with Prof Suzy Styles

1. Can you describe your role at NTU? 
I am an Assistant Professor of Psychology in the School of Social Sciences, and I lead the Brain, Language and Intersensory Perception Lab (BLIP Lab). We investigate how brains grow and change in response to linguistic information. We investigate patterns of language in young children, as well as in adults with different linguistic background. We also look at the interface between language and other sensory systems. I teach ‘An Ape’s Guide to Human Language’ and ‘Language in Perception and Thought’ as well as co-teaching some of the larger classes in Psychology.

2. Can you describe your academic journey leading to NTU? 
My undergraduate training was in linguistics and Asian studies. After living for a while in Japan, I was fascinated by the way that my mind was shaped by bilingualism, and I knew I wanted to study more about language in the mind. For my doctoral research, I conducted eye-gaze studies with hundreds of toddlers at the Oxford University BabyLab, where I developed infant-friendly versions of the psycholinguistics task known as ‘priming’. I stayed as a postdoctoral researcher, and Career Development Fellow (held jointly by the Department of Experimental Psychology and St Hugh’s College), where I conducted EEG studies with infants and toddlers. Throughout my time at Oxford, monolingualism was the norm, so I gradually became interested in expanding my research into multilingual communities.  

3. What is your motivation for joining NTU? 
Singapore is a fascinating place to conduct linguistic research. With four official languages, a history of creative language contact, and bilingualism embedded in the school system, it opens up a variety of possibilities for exciting research. When I applied for the Nanyang Assistant Professorship scheme, I had a great experience during the interview process. I have learned a lot from my colleagues and my students. 

4. Can you describe your current research?
The main focus of my current research is to understand how different kinds of language exposure in the early years contribute to the development of strong language skills in children. One way to find out more about this is to make recordings of parent/child interactions, and ask parents lots of questions about their language beliefs and language plans for their child. We can combine this information with information about the child’s emerging language skills to find out more about the relationships between parental language use and children’s developing skills. We also conduct neuroimaging and behavioural studies with toddlers and with adults to tackle the same questions from a variety of perspectives. I also work on open science projects, with the goal of improving the overall quality of research through clarity, diversity, and community collaboration. 

5. What is currently the hot topic in your research field? 
Bilingualism is pretty hot right now – There are some great debates in the field about whether being bilingual gives a person cognitive advantages of one kind or another, and these lead to really interesting questions about the language learning brain, and different ways that kids can grow into bilingualism. On the other hand, a lot of cognitive research has a simplified model of bilingualism that assumes each language can be neatly separated from the others… We need to work harder on describing the rich mosaic of multilingual influences over development. There is plenty more work to be done in this area!

6. What do you enjoy doing beyond your research? 
I love to make things! I like to draw, sew, and experiment with geometry and pattern in free-hand bead-weaving. When I travel, I love to see different visual cultures reflected in art and traditional crafts. 

Selected publications 

• Styles SJ, Kovic V, Ke H, & Šoškić A (In press 2021). Towards ARTEM-IS: Design Guidelines for evidence-based EEG methodology reporting tools. Neuroimage. 
• Preprint: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/myn7t 

• Woon FT, Yogarrajah EC, Fong S, Salleh NSM, Sundaray S & Styles SJ (2021). Creating a corpus of multilingual parent-child speech remotely: Lessons learned in a large-scale onscreen picturebook sharing task. Frontiers in Psychology.  
• Open Access: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/yeg6u 

• Shang N & Styles SJ (2017). Is a high tone pointy? Degree of pitch-change in lexical tone predicts of sound-to-shape correspondences in Chinese bilinguals. Frontiers in Psychology. 8(2139): 1-13. 
• Open Access: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02139 
• Turoman N & Styles SJ (2017). Glyph guessing for ‘oo’ and ‘ee’: Spatial frequency information and sound symbolic matching in ancient and unfamiliar scripts. Royal Society Open Science. 4(170882), 1-14. 
• Open Access: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.170882 
• Styles SJ & Gawne L (2017). When does maluma/takete fail: Two key failures and a meta-analysis show that phonology and phonotactics matter. i-Perception. 8:4. 1-14. 
• Open Access: https://doi.org/10.1177/2041669517724807