Serene Siow
Serene Siow
Serene /səˈriːn/
adjective
calm, peaceful, and untroubled; tranquil.萧 [xiāo] 思 [sī] 玲 [líng]
Postdoc @ NUS/NTU,
working with Assoc Prof Setoh Peipei.
Research on bilingual vocabulary development.
Swing dancer, fiction writer, makes friends using homemade brownies.
Key Publications
COGNATES AND TRANSLATION EQUIVALENTS
Siow, S., Lepadatu, I., Gillen, N. A., & Plunkett, K. (2025). Bilingual Toddlers’ Vocabulary Growth Interacts with Existing Knowledge and Cross-Linguistic Similarity. Journal of Child Language, 1-28. open accessBILINGUAL VOCABULARY SIZE
Siow, S., Gillen, N. A., Lepădatu, I., & Plunkett, K. (2023). Double it up: Vocabulary size comparisons between UK bilingual and monolingual toddlers. Infancy, 28(6). open accessPREDICTORS OF WORD ACQUISITION ORDER
Siow, S., & Plunkett, K. (2021). Exploring the variable effects of frequency and semantic diversity as predictors for a word's ease of acquisition in different word classes. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 43. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/83t6n1rq pdfREMOTE DEVELOPMENTAL RESEARCH
Gillen, N. A., Siow, S., Lepadatu, I., Sucevic, J., Plunkett, K., & Duta, M. (2021, May 4). Tapping into the potential of remote developmental research: introducing the OxfordBabylab app. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/kxhmw pdf
Teaching & Outreach
Lecture: HP2300 Developmental Psychology: 2025
Nanyang Technological University, SingaporeLecture: EL3210 Topics in the Psychology of Language: 2024
National University of SingaporeWorkshop: Introduction to R and R Markdown: 2024
National University of SingaporeLecture: EL3206 Psycholinguistics: 2023
National University of SingaporeTutorial: Developmental Science: 2020 – 2022
University of OxfordWorkshop: Using tidyverse for questionnaire data in R: 2021
University of OxfordTutorial: UNIQ (academic access programme): 2019 – 2021
University of OxfordTutorial: Opportunity Oxford (academic access programme): 2020
University of Oxford
Public-facing Materials
Current Projects
Seeing is believing? Polysemy of perception verbs for belief
- Online game-like computerised 2AFC task (4-6 years old)Are there patterns in the language input to help learners differentiate factive and non-factive verbs?
- Corpus analysis (child-ambient speech corpora)Are learners differentiate factive and non-factive verbs based on patterns in the language input?
- Human simulation paradigm with nonce word sentences (adults)
Past Projects
PhD thesisHow Bilingual Language Experience Shapes the Infant Lexicon: Implications for Word Learning and Lexical Access
ORA depositSupervisors: Prof Kim Plunkett, Dr Janette Chow (University of Oxford)Babies learn a lot in their early years of life. I study how babies learn their first words. Bilinguals need to learn two times the number of words as monolinguals. Some words sound more like each other than others – does this make these words easier to learn? My work looks at how these words that sound alike (cognates) may change how babies learn words and recognise them.
Collaborative project
Funded by ESRC grant to Prof Kim Plunkett and Prof Nuria Sebastian-Galles
Link to project website
Are bilingual children better at learning more similar languages?
- Online parent-report infant vocabulary questionnaire (12-36 months old)Are bilingual children better at recognising more similar words?
- Online toddler touchscreen vocabulary task (20-24 months old)Do bilingual children retrieve words from both languages at once?
- Lab-based experiment - priming paradigm (20, 25, 30 months old)How does a child's learning environment influence their vocabulary?
- Semantic network analysis of child-directed speech corpora + vocabulary questionnaireHow do we define similarity between words in different languages?
- Online adult behavioural experiment; computational modelling
Education
PhD / DPhil in Experimental Psychology: 2023
University of OxfordMSc in Human Cognitive Neuropsychology: 2018
The University of EdinburghPsychology and Linguistics (MA Hons): 2017
The University of Edinburgh
Research Employment
Postdoctoral Fellow: 2022-present
National University of SingaporeGraduate Research Assistant: 2019-2022
University of OxfordUndergraduate Research Assistant: 2016
University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
Mentoring Experience
Wong, Z. (in progress). [Bachelor’s thesis, National University of Singapore].Bengardi, D. (2020). Relative Amount of Exposure to Languages and the Development of
Semantic Networks [Bachelor’s thesis, University of Oxford].