Child Directed Speech in SpongeBob SquarePants in its Original English Language and in its Persian-Dubbed Version
Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: Thisstudy evaluated the extent to which cartoons originally made for Anglo-Americanchildren keep the same Child Directed Speech (CDS) characteristics after beingdubbed into Persian. The corpus of the present study included 6 episodes ofSpongeBob SquarePants which is one of the best-selling American animatedtelevision series. The cartoon episodes were transcribed in its originalEnglish language and in its Persian-dubbed version. DePaulo and Bonvillian’s(1978) categorization of CDS was a fairly consistent and comprehensivedescription; thus, 5 major CDS features in this categorization were assigned asour coding scheme: (1) short sentence length, (2) phonological simplification,(3) semantic simplification, (4) unique lexicon, and (5) syntactic simplification.Then, the English and Persian scripts of the cartoons were coded in thecategories. Number of references and coverage percentage for each category ofCDS in the cartoons were calculated based on which we could run one-waychi-square tests for independence and find whether SpongeBob SquarePants dubbedinto Persian from English has kept the same CDS features available in theoriginal cartoon. Taken as a whole, the results indicated that after beingdubbed into Persian, SpongeBob SquarePants has kept the same CDS features justin terms of syntactic categories, and it is different from its originallanguage in terms of phonological and semantic categories. Thus, it might beconcluded that cartoons do not keep all of their CDS features after being dubbedinto another language, as a result they might not be as effective as theoriginal ones for child first language learning.
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2554969201