Siow Serene
SIOW Serene
Serene /səˈriːn/
adjective
calm, peaceful, and untroubled; tranquil.萧 [xiāo] 思 [sī] 玲 [líng]
Postdoc @ NUS/NTU,
working with Professor 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
GUEST LECTURES
Developmental Psychology: 2025
Nanyang Technological University, SG
Perceptual Development; Motor Development; Cognitive Development; Theory of Mind; Language DevelopmentTopics in the Psychology of Language: 2024
National University of Singapore, SG
Code-switchingHow to Get Humans and Machines to Talk to Each Other: 2024
National University of Singapore, SG
Overview of Child Language AcquisitionPsycholinguistics: 2023
National University of Singapore, SG
Introduction to Language AcquisitionWORKSHOPS
Introduction to R and R Markdown: 2024
National University of Singapore, SGUsing tidyverse for questionnaire data in R: 2021
University of Oxford, UKTUTORIALS
Developmental Science: 2020 – 2022
University of Oxford, UKUNIQ (academic access programme): 2019 – 2021
University of Oxford, UKOpportunity Oxford (academic access programme): 2020
University of Oxford, UK
Public-facing Materials
Current Projects
English dominance in vocabulary outcomes among bilingual toddlers in Singapore
- Singapore Communicative Development Inventories (18-24 months old)Bilingual language exposure and academic outcomes
- Parent report questionnaires and examination scores
Past 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)
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
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
Research Fellow: 2024-present
National University of Singapore; Nanyang Technological University, SGPostdoctoral Fellow: 2022-2024
National University of Singapore, SGGraduate Research Assistant: 2019-2022
University of Oxford, UKUndergraduate Research Assistant: 2016
University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, MY
Mentoring Experience
Investigating the role of prosody in disambiguating speech acts to acquire attitude verbs’ subcategorization properties in Singapore Mandarin [Bachelor’s thesis, National University of Singapore].Relative Amount of Exposure to Languages and the Development of
Semantic Networks [Bachelor’s thesis, University of Oxford].