FASS Staff Profile

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR REBECCA L. STARR
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
DEPARTMENT of ENGLISH, LINGUISTICS & THEATRE STUDIES

Appointment:
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
Office:
Email:
rstarr@nus.edu.sg
Tel:
Fax:
Homepage:
http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/ellsrl/
Tabs

Brief Introduction

B.A. Harvard University, Linguistics with certificate in Mandarin Chinese

Ph.D. Stanford University, Linguistics with designation in Cognitive Science

 

I am an associate professor studying variation phenomena in English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, and Irish Gaelic. I am primarily interested in the acquisition of sociolinguistic knowledge among children, particularly those growing up in a bilingual environment. Currently I am leading the Voices of Children in Singapore project investigating how children here learn about language variation. I am also beginning work on the Singapore Multilingual Corpus, which seeks to document the language use patterns of multilingual Singaporeans, including documentation of Southern Chinese varieties such as Cantonese and Hokkien. I also study teachers' stylistic variation in the classroom, sociolinguistic variation in the media, and the sociophonetic construction of style, as well as sociolinguistic variation in Singapore more generally.

 

Website: www.rebeccaluriestarr.com


Teaching Areas

Courses taught include:

  • EL1101E/GEK1101: Nature of Language
  • EL2151: Social Variation in English
  • EL3208: Bilingualism
  • EL3231: Phonetics
  • EL5252: Language Variation and Change
  • EL5203: Sociophonetics

Graduate Supervision

I am happy to supervise theses in the areas of variationist sociolinguistics and first or second language acquisition (particularly as it relates to variation). Students interested in working on Chinese are particularly encouraged to apply -- I am also willing to supervise research on English, Japanese, Korean, and other languages.


Current Research

Current Projects:


Research Interests

  • Language variation and change in English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, and Irish Gaelic
  • Acquisition of variation and sociolinguistic knowledge among children in multilingual settings
  • Sociolinguistic variation and teacher speech
  • Sociophonetic construction of feminine styles
  • Language in the media

Publications

BOOKS/MONOGRAPHS

    • Starr, Rebecca Lurie. 2017. Sociolinguistic Variation and Acquisition in Two-Way Language Immersion: Negotiating the Standard. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

JOURNAL ARTICLES

  • Starr, Rebecca Lurie. 2019. Attitudes and exposure as predictors of -t/d deletion among local and expatriate children in Singapore. Language Variation and Change.
    • Starr, Rebecca Lurie & Brinda Balasubramaniam. 2019. Variation and Change in English /r/ among Tamil Indian Singaporeans. World Englishes.
    • Starr, Rebecca Lurie. 2019. Cross-dialectal awareness and use of the BATH-TRAP distinction in Singapore: Investigating the effects of overseas travel and media consumption. Journal of English Linguistics.
    • Park, Mihi and Rebecca Lurie Starr. 2019. The acquisition of L3 variation among early bilinguals: the roles of L2 experience, home language and linguistic factors. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism.
    • Starr, Rebecca Lurie & Mie Hiramoto. 2018. Inclusion, exclusion, and racial identity in Singapore's language education system. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 2018. 1-15. 
    • Starr, Rebecca Lurie, Andre Joseph Theng, Kevin Martens Wong, Natalie Tong Jing Yi, Nurul Afiqah Bte Ibrahim, Alicia Chua Mei Yin, Clarice Yong Hui Min, Frances Loke Wei, Helen Dominic, Keith Jayden Fernandez, and Matthew Peh Tian Jing. 2017. Third culture kids in the outer circle: The development of sociolinguistic knowledge among local and expatriate children in Singapore. Language in Society 46(4). 507 – 546.
    • Starr, Rebecca Lurie and Stephanie S. Shih. 2017. The syllable as a prosodic unit in Japanese lexical strata: Evidence from text-setting. Glossa 2(1). 93.
    • Starr, Rebecca L. 2015. Predicting NP Forms in Vernacular Written Cantonese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 43.1A.
    • Starr, Rebecca L. 2015. Sweet Voice: the role of voice quality in a Japanese feminine style. Language in Society 44.1. 1 - 34.
    • Park, Mihi and Rebecca L. Starr. 2015. The role of formal L2 learning experience in L3 acquisition among early bilinguals. International Journal of Multilingualism (Oct. 2015).  1 – 18.
    • Hall-Lew, Lauren and Rebecca L. Starr. 2010. Beyond the 2nd  Generation: English Use among Chinese Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area. English Today 26.3. 12-19.
    • Hall-Lew, Lauren, Elizabeth Coppock, and Rebecca L. Starr. 2010. Indexing Political Persuasion: Variation in the Iraq Vowels. American Speech 85.1. 91-102.

BOOK CHAPTERS

    • Starr, Rebecca Lurie. 2022. Changing language, changing character types. In Lauren Hall-Lew, Emma Moore and Robert J. Podesva (eds.) Social meaning and variation: Theorizing the Third Wave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • Starr, Rebecca Lurie and Tianxiao Wang. To appear. Navigating L2 sociolinguistic variation amid contested norms and societal shifts: A case study of two L2 Mandarin speakers in Singapore. In Aurélie Nardy, Anna Ghimenton, and Jean-Pierre Chevrot (eds.) Sociolinguistic variation and language across the lifespan. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
    • Starr, Rebecca Lurie and Tianxiao Wang. Under review. Lexical tone production over the lifespan of a Mandarin L2 learner. In Feng Xiao (ed.) Second language Chinese development. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
    • Hall-Lew, Lauren, Rebecca L. Starr, and Elizabeth Coppock. 2012. Style-Shifting in the U.S. Congress: The foreign (a) vowel in ‘Iraq(i)’. In Juan Manuel Hernandez Campoy and Juan Antonio Cutillas Espinosa, eds. Style-Shifting in Public: New Perspectives on Stylistic Variation. Amsterstam: John Benjamins.
    • Podesva, Robert J, Jason Brenier, Lauren Hall-Lew, Stacy Lewis, and Rebecca L. Starr. 2012. Condoleezza Rice and the Sociophonetic Construction of Identity. In Juan Manuel Hernandez Campoy and Juan Antonio Cutillas Espinosa, eds. Style-Shifting in Public: New Perspectives on Stylistic Variation. Amsterstam: John Benjamins.

CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS

    • Ramscar, Michael, Asha Halima Smith, Melody Dye, Richard Futrell, Peter Hendrix, Harald Baayen, and Rebecca Starr. 2013. The ‘universal’ structure of name grammars. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 35. 3245 – 3250.
    • Starr, Rebecca L. 2010. Teaching the Standard Without Speaking the Standard: Variation Among Mandarin-Speaking Teachers in a Dual-Immersion School. Working Papers in Linguistics: Selected Papers from NWAV 37. University of Pennsylvania.
    • Zheng, Yanli, Richard Sproat, Liang Gu, Izhak Shafran, Haolang Zhou, Yi Su, Daniel Jurafsky, Rebecca Starr and Su-Youn Yoon. 2005. Accent Detection and Speech Recognition for Shanghai-Accented Mandarin. In Proceedings of EUROSPEECH-05, Lisbon, Portugal.

Last Modified: 2023-11-06         Total Visits: 8410