summary of "language in Teletubbies"

[Shanley E. M. Allen]

A sincere thank you to everyone who responded to my post concerning
research on language use in the Teletubbies program.  Since most of the
discussion took place on the list, I'll just highlight the main results and
share a couple of off-list communications.


WEB SITES
  The web sites I mentioned in my post are these:
PBS: http://www.pbs.org/teletubbies/
BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/teletubbies/
They both have general information about the show, interviews with the
producers and others, a list of frequently asked questions, and pointers to
some newspaper articles about the show.
  There is also a page devoted to Teletubbies on Parenthood Web:
http://www.parenthoodweb.com
  There are hundreds of other web pages having to do with Teletubbies, but
most of them are trying to sell products or talking about Tinky-Winky's
sexual orientation.  These three were the most helpful I found (though I
only looked at about 50 of the pages that looked most promising from the
information on AltaVista).


EH-OH vs. UH-OH
  Several people mentioned the TT's pronunciation of eh-oh and uh-oh.  The
concensus, with which I agree, is that there are two distinct forms -
"eh-oh" meaning "hello", and "uh-oh" meaning "oops" or something similar.
I agree with people that these are sometimes difficult to distinguish.
Apparently the French version also uses "eh-oh" rather than a form of
"bonjour".


TELETUBBY PHONOLOGY
  Shelley Velleman's student Sarah Schmit has written a paper about the
phonology of the Teletubbies.  She claims that while much of the phonology
is similar to that found in child language, some is more advanced than
would be seen in children of the target age for this show (e.g. accuracy of
consonant clusters), and some is unlike typical child phonology (e.g. odd
substitutions for liquids).
  Miriam Coimbra writes that Teletubby phonology in Brazilian Portuguese is
more like that of 3-4-year-olds than that of younger children, that it
shows some aspects that are more advanced than would be expected (e.g.
consonant clusters), and does not seem to show the deviances Schmit finds
in English.


IS THIS LANGUAGE HARMFUL TO CHILD LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT?
  Most respondents - including mothers and child language experts - agreed
that the Teletubby language will probably not have a negative effect on
children's language learnng.
  Alison Henry mentioned that one of her students did a project on the
Teletubbies arguing that the language was very like that of children who
would be the age of younger siblings of the viewers, and therefore had no
more impact on acquisition than hearing younger children speaking.
  Mabel Rice provided some very helpful references to work on language in
Sesame Street, which showed that the language used in SS had a facilitative
effect on child language learning, with specific mention of vocabulary
development.  She also noted her observations about TT based on the shows
she reviewed for PBS.
  Cliff Pye also mentioned that  there has been quite a lot of research on
the language effects of Seseme Street, including work by John Wright and
Aletha Houston.
  Lynn Santelmann noted a paper on the effects of language in the Barney
show in a recent cognitive or developmental psychology journal.  She notes
that the article claimed that the repitition and other features of language
used on Barney were beneficial to children's language development (or at
least the group who watched Barney episodes did somewhat better on their
language measures than those that didn't).  I haven't yet been able to
locate this article.
  Lois Bloom provided a summary of her comments on TT for ABC News.
  Jean Berko Gleason and Paula Menyuk provided a copy of a Boston Globe
article on TT for which they and Steven Pinker were interviewed.  It is
appended below.
  Many linguist parents remarked how much their children enjoyed watching TT.
  Dominic Watt noted that using TT pictures and dolls as an elicitation
tool has been very helpful in his experiments on child phonology, since
children love to talk about the Teletubbies.
  Julie Watt suggested contacting David Buckingham who does much work on
children and British TV.  She notes that he is Reader in Education at the
Institute of Education or may be contacted through the British Film
Institute.


Thanks once again for everyone who took the time to respond to my question.
The responses will be very helpful in providing material for my class
debate.

Best,
Shanley Allen.




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BOSTON GLOBE ARTICLE

Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company
The Boston Globe
April 5, 1998, Sunday, City Edition
SECTION: FOCUS; Pg. D5

HEADLINE: 'Teletubbies' need no translation;
THE WORD / JAN FREEMAN

BYLINE: By Jan Freeman, Globe Staff

BODY:
Tomorrow is  "Teletubbies" time in American living rooms, as the hit kiddie
show arrives, trailing clouds  of linguistic controversy, from its native
England.

The  Teletubbies themselves, four roly-poly toddler characters played by
adults in pastel Dr.  Dentons, look harmless enough, despite their
alien-style antennas. But they caused a furor in Britain by speaking more
or  less genuine toddler talk - cooter for scooter, tustard for custard,
eh-oh for  hello, wabbit for rabbit. ("Teletubbies" itself is pronounced
telly-tubbies, a  play on the British slang for television; the characters'
tubby tummies are  equipped with little telly screens.)

Because the show is aimed at children as young as 12 to 18 months, some
parents  were horrified by the Teletubbies' toddlerese. In response to
their distress,  the baby talk was toned down last summer; and in the PBS
broadcasts, tubby talk  will have an American accent.  But American
parents, too, are  sure to be wondering: Should characters created for kids
who are just mastering  language be allowed to use baby talk?

It's a concern Robert Conway of Belmont raised earlier this year when he
wrote  to ask why Cookie Monster is allowed to inflict his ungrammatical
"Me want cookie!" on the ears of babes.  An educational program like
"Sesame Street," he thought, should set a good example by hewing to
standard grammar.

But psychologists who study language acquisition say parents can relax:
Baby  talk is universal, baby talk is useful, and there's no reason to
think hearing  it on television will impede a child's language learning.

"Children learn early on that different people talk in different ways,"
says  Jean Berko Gleason, a professor of psychology at Boston University.
"It is OK for them to hear Cookie Monster  say 'Me want cookie.' That's how
Cookie Monster talks." Baby talk won't get in the way as long as children
also hear  "a good deal of language that is appropriate to their age and
stage," says Gleason.

Her BU colleague Paula Menyuk agrees:  "There is no evidence . . . that
caregivers who use  baby talk more have infants who are retarded in their
language development."

Steven Pinker of MIT, author of  "The Language Instinct," is even more
vehement:  "The chance of kids' language being corrupted by the loathsome
Teletubbies is  nil," he says. Children not only can recognize baby talk,
they are  generally  "pretty good at segregating language input by speaker
and compartmentalizing the  different varieties." In other words, babies
are smarter than we think about language; they know  that  "tubby talk" and
Cookie Monsterese are not the languages grown-ups speak. Today's small
"Teletubbies" fans will  not go off to college saying wabbit, any more than
their Looney Tuned-in  parents did.

A few child-rearing authorities still dislike baby talk, mainly on
aesthetic  grounds, it seems, but their numbers are dwindling as science
topples their  prejudices. A study  published last year, for instance,
found that mothers speaking unrelated  languages produced the same kind of
baby talk when speaking to their infants,  exaggerating certain vowel
sounds to give them extra clarity. And far from  discouraging baby talk,
one popular child-rearing book gives detailed  instructions on doing it,
and cautions parents not to let self-consciousness  stop them from babbling
and cooing. Better too much coochy-coochy-coo, it  seems, than not enough.

If parents still want to worry about the Teletubbies invasion, the British
experience suggests it's the older children they should  keep an eye on.
"Teletubbies" is a trippy sort of show, and young ravers have allegedly
been coming home  >from their all-night parties to groove on its
psychedelically absurdist  landscape. Despite the BBC's ban on reproducing
copyrighted images or sound,  the World Wide Web is dense with fan  sites
for decoding Tubbies arcana and debating  " 'Teletubbies': Dangerous
subversives or harmless drivel?"

For babies and toddlers, the most dangerous thing about the program is
probably  sitting around watching it. Last month, yet another study linked
obesity in  children with the amount of TV they  watch; America seems to be
producing enough home-grown teletubbies without the  encouragement of the
brand-name British imports.
What's the word? Write or e-mail yours to Jan Freeman at The Boston Globe,
PO  Box 2378, Boston, MA 02107-2378; freeman(at sign)globe.com. Please
include a hometown and phone number.
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Shanley E. M. Allen, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Boston University
Graduate Program in Applied Linguistics
Developmental Studies Department, School of Education
605 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA, 02215, U.S.A.
phone: +1-617-358-0354
fax: +1-617-353-3924
e-mail: shanley at bu.edu
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