-Rui Qi- Choo

I had the absolute privilege of interviewing one of my PhD supervisors, Prof Marilyn Vihman, as part of the Communications Committee work I do @infantstudies.bsky.social. I could listen to her talk every day, kinda miss the days (and people) in York!

Text: In the latter half of 2020, I decided to enrol for Baba Malay class to learn more about my Peranakan Chinese heritage. One of the lessons was how to name everyone in the family tree – as expected, no given names! There are some interesting terms, though, and I wonder about their backstories. For instance, I wonder how and when laki started to mean a woman’s husband (I hope she indeed felt lucky), and how the youngest child, anak bongsu (literally, child youngest), may also be called anak chuchi perot (literally, child wash stomach), i.e., the child that washes out one’s stomach, presumably free of babies, forevermore. There is also a song with music and lyrics written by Alvin Oon called ‘Sedara Baba Nyonya (The Relatives’ Names Song)’ that helpfully teaches the terms of address of immediate and extended family members. It starts and ends off with this verse that echoes the early socialisation point from earlier, reminding us to be mindful not to call people by the wrong names.

(3/3) 2 - I had wanted to squeeze in a paragraph or two talking about my Peranakan heritage and share this glorious Relatives' Name Song video (music and lyrics by Alvin Oon): youtu.be/c-foLQ-R7Ws. Also, whoever came up with 'anak chuchi perot' deserves a prize.

(2/3) 1 - Alternate title of this post: 'I can't remember my grandfather's name'. I still cannot remember, I refuse to ask anyone, I'm still willing myself to have the answer ✨spring✨ on me at 2am some day.

(1/3) It's my turn to be on the #infantstudies Researcher Spotlight! I turned a bit of my #ICIS2024 poster on kinship terms into a blog post for the Baby Blog. If nothing else, click to see the cute images courtesy of Suzy Styles and the BLIP Lab NTU crew. Some outtakes:

can I code fast? no. but can I code well? also no. but does my code work? alas, no

New stroop task just dropped

Comic depictions of the first page of research papers in the language sciences, with titles that include the following: Just what the hell is a word anyway? See how this single cognitive process or brain area or neural oscillation or gene explains language! Based on the shapes of these old bones, Homo erectus could sing .... don't @ me. A baby looked at one thing more than the other, now we know the secret to grammar. If you think about it, every language is fundamentally the same, amirite? We taught a load of undergrads a made-up language, lol. On the staggering diversity of the many languages across the world. Remember the thing you said only humans could do, here's a video of a monkey / dolphin / corvid / octopus / honeybee doing it. I trained this AI with 80 billion tweets and it became head-writer for phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

To accompany all those Bluesky science/academia #starterpacks, how about we also share introductions to the literature of our different fields. I present here a handy guide to main types of papers in the language sciences (inspired by the amazing @xkcd.com).
#language #linguistics #science #academia

pls add me while I convince Suzy Styles to come on Bluesky :) thank you!

Pretty amused at the droves of followers the @infantstudies.bsky.social account has been getting every day since two weeks ago (yikes, it's been 2 weeks!?). Go follow that account for research blurbs (that authors write, or, more often than not, I write and they vet) from the Infancy journal!

A jack-o'-lantern with one bobby shape cut out and one spiky shape cut out, sorta like eyes, lit inside on a blurred, dimly lit background

One of the shapes on this pumpkin is called kiki and the other one is called boo-ba.

Which is, uh, witch?

University Commas xkcd.com/2995

yayyy! (Also I looked up 'butnvery' and Google thought I meant 'burberry' :D)

Can it code as well as a human? Well, no. But can it increase implementation speed? Also no. But does it reduce overtime? Not as much as NOT using it does. But does it write less buggy code? Quite the opposite, actually! But does it save money? In the long run, almost certainly not. But is it more e

just put the geekiest thing into the book
Latin didn't have a word for 'yes'. Nor ancient British. Romans would say e.g. 'verily' (ita vero)
'Yes' in Romance languages descends from other ways of indicating agreement - 'thus' (sic) -> 'si', 'that it be' (hoc illud) -> 'oui'...

People Who Constantly Point Out Grammar Mistakes Are Pretty Much Jerks, Scientists Find But you probably already knew that.

This is probably my third favourite scientific study in the world: www.sciencealert.com/people-who-p...

A completed coloring sheet reads “every body has an accent,” with an arm with IPA tattoos, signing hands, and a mouth

I have some coloring sheets your language and #linguistics classes might enjoy for some finals season de-stressing! Here’s one of my students’ work!

sites.google.com/view/ear-sci...

Look, it me! This is a side project that began in February this year, look out for my emails if you recently published a paper in the Infancy journal!

An ellipsis (…) comprised of 3 eclipse PNGs instead of dots. The text beneath reads “eclipsis :)”

hey has anyone done this yet

People who live off scams are both pros and cons.

Please teach your students (and yourself) how to fully document your studies. This is basic data management. If you don't know how to start--go to osf.io and look a prereg templates. They are a good starting point but consider whether you have documented to a point that a novice could run your study

Schroedinger’s Pandora’s Box; you don’t know if the cat’s all the evil in the world or not until you open it.

#Introduction After n months, I'm here! I'm Rui Qi (pronounced Ray Chee; my first name is two words, pls pls do not call me just 'Rui'), a researcher of bilingual Mandarin/English-speaking children's speech. I'm a Research Fellow at BLIP Lab NTU, Sg and a Psychology Lecturer at SUSS, Sg.