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

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This study evaluated the extent to which cartoons originally made for Anglo-American children keep the same Child Directed Speech (CDS) characteristics after being dubbed into Persian.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.