Inspiring people

I have interests in three areas in special education: social-communication difficulties, early language and literacy development in multilingual contexts, and inclusive education. I explore how children acquire early developmental skills through interactions with the people around them, how early human development and the environment mutually affect each other. My work on literacy development explores how cognitive and reading skills transfer from one language to another. I also apply knowledge in the area to innovate and implement inclusive intervention and teaching methods that improve the wellbeing and quality of lives of young children, especially those who are neurodevelopmentally diverse.  

My biggest challenge right now, is the pandemic. The drastic change in early intervention and education landscapes have disadvantaged children from the minority groups. We have to adapt to the changes quickly, from innovating online research paradigms to collect the data that we need to improving on intervention and teaching methods that will support these students’ learning.  

Developing methods to understand language and social communication learning and difficulties from the perspective of conversational entrainment (or coordination of communicative actions such as speech rate, and language units), and exploring effects of culture on social-communication and cognitive outcomes of a parent-mediated intervention for children with autism. We are also exploring equality, diversity and inclusion at UNM by understanding factors that affect inclusion among students, and students’ experiences with assignment feedback.  

I find RKE and Graduate School’s workshops and feedback on research grant writing, helpful. I also appreciate FASS’ PGR student fee waiver for funded projects.  

There is a wide range of cutting edge studies in child development these studies come mainly from mainstream Western cultures.  My research hopes to reveal factors from non-mainstream cultures in the world, such as those in Malaysia so we can better understand the interconnections between cultural differences, resource availability, social-economic status and multilingualism, in the life trajectory of young children.  

Our research has revealed developmental factors that are both culture and language universals as well as those that are culture and language specific. For instance, although the literature has cautioned that cultural differences may reduce the impact of widely used western-based intervention approaches such as joint-attention, our findings showed that it is knowledge and skill development that empower parents and teachers to take on active roles in supporting children’s development, and in reducing inequality in children’s learning. These findings imply an urgent need for access to skill training as well as innovative ways to impart skill training, in efforts to improve the wellbeing of children who are neurodevelopmentally diverse. 

As the interconnection between cultural and developmental differences is complex, I’d like to gradually increase cognitive, cultural and linguistic factors that I have not explored, into my future research.  

At the moment, my research is focused on populations from low-resource countries, so my research gives visibility to these countries in the international arena and eventually allows other countries to learn about and from these countries.  

There is a consensus that we need sufficient resources to support children who are neurodevelopmentally diverse in any contexts. Changes at all levels of the community is needed to level up intervention and learning support systems. One way to achieve this is by having a comprehensive understanding on the mutual relationship between the biophysical aspects of human development and the environment – this is the driver of my research motivation. 

Being able to generate findings that could potentially answer questions that clinicians, educators and parents need in order to better support their young children especially those who are neurodevelopmentally diverse.    

I hope that we’ll be able to continue to unravel more culture and language universal and specific elements in our understanding of social-communication development, literacy acquisition, and inclusive practices, and eventually identify highly effective intervention, teaching methods and systems to support equality, diversity and inclusion of children from the minority population and their families.  

To me, collaboration is important for knowledge and skills exchange, and sharing of resources. I enjoy learning from collaborators of different fields and experiences. They are also a great source of social and emotional support when I hit a stumbling block in research! 

The end of one’s PhD is just the beginning of their research career. So continuous engagement in different research activities such as dialogues and training, collaboration with experienced researchers, and making the efforts to disseminate our findings, are all important to keep our passion and momentum in research going.