The Small World of Singlish Words
The Small
World of Singlish Words is our lab’s ongoing attempt to
collect free associations for uniquely Singaporean words,
like shiok, diam, sian, and
chope. We hope to collect enough free associations
in order to build the first cognitive language network of
Singapore English words. Here is a rudimentary network of
the word “shiok”!
The word association game is very simple: all you
have to do is to type out the first few words that come to
your mind when presented with one of our Singlish
words.
To help with our research, simply click here and begin!
Thank you for your contributions to science :)
This project was inspired by the Small World of Words
project. If you would like to receive updates on the
project, drop us an email at singlishwords@nus.edu.sg,
or check out our social media pages below:
Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
If you are a reporter/journalist, I would be
happy to chat with you about our latest findings about
Singapore English - feel free to get in
touch!
Our research on Singlish word associations has been
featured by Channel
8, The
Business Times, Channel
News Asia, Lianhezaobao
and The
HomeGround Asia.
Related research publications
Yee, T. B. L., & Siew, C. S. Q. (2026). Comparing the
influence of phonological network structure on spoken word
recognition performance across speakers of North American
and Singapore English. Applied Psycholinguistics, 47, e34.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716426100770
Jiang, Z. R., & Siew, C. S. Q. (2026). Word frequency
and contextual diversity measures for Singapore English.
Behavior Research Methods, 58, 149.
https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-026-03012-1
Siew, C. S. Q., Chang, F., & Wong, J. J. (2025).
Investigating the Effects of Valence, Arousal, Concreteness,
and Humor on Words Unique to Singapore English. Journal of
Cognition, 8(1), 53. https://doi.org/10.5334/joc.470
Siew, C. S. Q. (2024). A comparison of word humor ratings
across speakers of North American, British, and Singapore
English. Memory & Cognition.
https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-024-01587-8
Preprint
Siew, C. S. Q. (2024). Tracking Lexical Knowledge of
Concepts Unique to Singapore English Among Speakers of
Singapore English. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of
the Cognitive Science Society, 46. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8d8595gm
Wong, J. J., & Siew, C. S. Q. (2024). Preliminary
Data from the Small World of Singlish Words Project:
Examining Responses to Common Singlish Words. Journal of
Open Psychology Data. https://openpsychologydata.metajnl.com/articles/10.5334/jopd.108
Wong, J. J., & Siew, C. S. Q. (2023). Word
Association Network of English Words Unique to Singapore
English. In P. L. Villagrá, X. Li (Eds.), Proceedings of
the International Workshop on Cognitive AI 2023
co-located with the 3rd International Conference on Learning
& Reasoning (IJCLR 2023). https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3644/
