mass media and acquisition

[Annick.DeHouwer]

The issues you raise have been a (side) interest of mine for a while now
and I have so far been unable to find any literature that pertains to the
issues of variation that you refer to (there is of course the work by
Mabel Rice and colleagues on the question whether children CAN learn words
from TV, and they can). I am convinced that children can and do learn a
lot about language variation from TV. I have observed four-year-olds here
in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium, do role playing in a
Northern Dutch accent although they'd never been to the Netherlands and
had had no exposure to the Northern Dutch variety except through
television. Another common observation here in Flanders is that
primary school-age children appear to know quite a bit of English, even
though they have never been exposed to English except through television
and popular music (instruction in English at school only starts when
children are 13, 14 years old). I've directed a small
(unpublished) research project that looked at what languages are used in
children's television programming here in Flanders and the result was that
over 50% of all children's television programming is in English with Dutch
subtitles. Currently a student of mine is setting up a project to look at
the link between young children's TV watching and their knowledge of
English. I'm not aware of any other projects investigating these issues
for young children, but Margie Berns (Purdue University), Uwe
Hasebrink (Hamburg University) and Kees de Bot (Katholic University of
Nijmegen) are involved in a large research project with
teenagers that partially involves the role of the media on these
youngsters' attitudes to English and on identity issues.

--Annick De Houwer
University of Antwerp, Belgium

On Sat, 6 May 2000, Daniel Dor wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I'm looking for whatever material there is on the
> influence/non-influence of mass media language on language acquisition.
> I'm NOT interested in stuff on the relation between exposure to TV and
> general development, or even linguistic development, but in actual
> structural influences. For example, when children who speak a certain
> local dialect of a language are exposed to a lot of TV spoken with the
> standard phonology, syntax and so on - do they get some of it, at the
> expense of their local variation? Or, when children are exposed to a lot
> of hours of another language on TV (in most places that would be global
> English), do they get any of it? And what does all that do in terms of
> their linguistic identities?
>
> thanks,
>
> -- Daniel
>
> Dr. Daniel Dor
> Dept. of Communications
> Tel Aviv University
> Ramat Aviv
> Israel
>
>