Child Directed Speech in SpongeBob SquarePants in its Original English Language and in its Persian-Dubbed Version

83 - 99, 30.06.2016

Maryam Meshkat Mehdi Karami

https://doi.org/10.20489/intjecse.239577

Abstract

This
study evaluated the extent to which cartoons originally made for Anglo-American
children keep the same Child Directed Speech (CDS) characteristics after being
dubbed into Persian. The corpus of the present study included 6 episodes of
SpongeBob SquarePants which is one of the best-selling American animated
television series. The cartoon episodes were transcribed in its original
English language and in its Persian-dubbed version. DePaulo and Bonvillian’s
(1978) categorization of CDS was a fairly consistent and comprehensive
description; thus, 5 major CDS features in this categorization were assigned as
our 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 the
categories. Number of references and coverage percentage for each category of
CDS in the cartoons were calculated based on which we could run one-way
chi-square tests for independence and find whether SpongeBob SquarePants dubbed
into Persian from English has kept the same CDS features available in the
original cartoon. Taken as a whole, the results indicated that after being
dubbed into Persian, SpongeBob SquarePants has kept the same CDS features just
in terms of syntactic categories, and it is different from its original
language in terms of phonological and semantic categories. Thus, it might be
concluded that cartoons do not keep all of their CDS features after being dubbed
into another language, as a result they might not be as effective as the
original ones for child first language learning.

Keywords

Cartoons, Child Directed Speech (CDS), First language, Persian-dubbed Cartoons

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