teletubbies

[Mabel Rice]

	I can provide some further background on the Teletubbies
and language questions raised by Shanley Allen.  Last spring, I was
contacted by PBS to review several Teletubbies tapes that were to be
aired on PBS beginning in April ‘98. They provided written materials
that included press clippings of the controversies surrounding the
characters’ use of baby talk, and descriptive information about the
development of the series, and bio material on Anne Wood and
Andrew Davenport, developers of the series.  Andrew is a graduate of
University College London where he majored in Speech Sciences.  The
packet of material did not include any specific information about
formative research.

I viewed the two episodes they provided for that purpose, and have
occasionally viewed bits and pieces of PBS broadcasting, so do not
feel expert on the program but my rather general response is favorable,
in light of some of my previous research.  I sketch here the gist of my
comments for PBS.

First, it seemed timely to provide some material suitable for toddlers.
There is extensive documentation of the fact that young children are
exposed to a lot of TV, so it is positive to have something potentially
beneficial for their viewing.  In a study with Dafna Lemish in which
toddlers were observed in viewing contexts in their home, we found
potentially language-facilitative caretaker-child interactions during the
viewing, especially of educational TV such as Sesame Street.    (Cf
Lemish & Rice, Television as a talking picture book: a prop for
language acquisition, J Child Language, 1986, 13, 251-274.)  As these
findings and other studies indicate, even young children are
cognitively active viewers of the medium of television; they like to talk
about what they see, they recognize objects and can relate them to
objects in their own experience, and they seem to want to make sense
of their viewing and to communicate that to others.  Other studies
have found that children (and chimps) prefer to view other children (or
chimps), i.e., that they watch most intently others like themselves.  It
would be interesting to see if this holds for Teletubbies.

Next, in the episodes I viewed, the writers present dialog in ways likely
to appeal to and be understood by young children.  The vocabulary
levels are of suitable content, and there is considerable redundancy,
both in the sense of talking about the here-and-now and in the sense
of repeated presentations of the same words/concepts.  The sentence
structures are also kept at simple clausal levels.  These attributes
characterize Sesame Street and Mr Rogers as well (cf Rice & Haight,
1986, “Motherese” of Mr Rogers: A description of the dialogue of
educational television programs.  Journal of Speech and Hearing
Disorders, 51, 282-287).  These and other features may be instrumental
in the positive effect of Sesame Street viewing on vocabulary
development (cf Rice, Huston, Truglio, & Wright, 1990, Words from
Sesame Street: Learning Vocabulary While Viewing, Developmental
Psychology, 26, 421-428) (and why there seems to be no effect for
adult TV fare such as soap operas or for entertainment animation
which has very adult-like dialog).

I was struck by some innovative uses of dialog in Teletubbies.  One is
the characters’ use of “Baby Talk”, and it will be interesting to learn
how accurately the producers have scripted it and how children
respond to it (Sarah Schmidt’s analysis should be helpful here).  The
media flap reminds me of the reaction to Oscar the Grouch, who says
things like “Me want cookie,” which caused a bit of an uproar at the
time, but which seems to be accepted by children as part of his
character.  I suspect that young viewers will regard the dialog of the
teletubbies in the same way as they regard the other sources of “baby
talk” in their lives.  The writers built in some interesting ways to
highlight adult dialog for the children, in that it often appears as the
voices of the “Voice Trumpets,” which are part of the show’s
emphasis on interactive technology and appears as a sort of flower-
microphone that sticks up out of the ground like a flower.   This “baby
talk” for the teletubbies and “adult talk” for the “voice trumpets” is an
interesting way to differentiate the two “registers” and it would be
interesting to know if the children benefit from it.  Finally, the “real
world” of live children, often toddlers, is in the program via the
televised segments where further overlap of dialog and referents is
provided in the form of live dialog from children and voice-over
narration.  So when the live footage begins of real children, the
viewers know they are going to be hearing “real talk” of children and
adults.  These techniques serve to associate the presentation forms
with the kind of dialog presented, which could be very effective in
helping the little viewers follow the dialog.  The media focus on the
"baby talk" of the lead characters seems to have overlooked the other
parts of the program

A final comment--it is my recollection that I was told that the US
version had been dubbed to eliminate the phrases and lexical items
that don’t jump the Atlantic, but perhaps they did not do a
comprehensive dubbing of the script and a few  bits remain.

Let me repeat that I do not attest to a scientific evaluation of the
program’s effectiveness in fostering language development, nor do I
know of such an investigation.  And I do not have an investment in
the production company and am not a regular viewer.

Happy viewing,
Mabel