Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper presents prevalence norms collected from a representative sample of Singapore English speakers for a set of 240 concepts unique to Singapore English. Prevalence refers to the proportion of people who know or recognize a particular concept. Because large-scale, diachronic language corpora are scarce for non-standard varieties of English, the present study aims to establish the collection of prevalence norms from a cross-sectional sample as a potential alternative for tracking changes in word usage patterns over time. Preliminary analyses indicate that lexical knowledge of Singapore English concepts differs across gender, age, and ethnic groups. In particular, while most concepts are generally well known, some concepts are better known by younger participants and others are better known by older participants. These results underline the dynamic nature of Singapore English vocabulary and demonstrate how simple psycholinguistic tasks could be used to study lexical change in under-resourced languages and varieties.