Otherwords

- [Erica] In 2019, when the Australian children's show "Bluey" hit American streaming services, parents started noticing something strange.

Their kids were suddenly looking for the rubbish bin, asking what's for brekky, and getting excited about going to the ehport.

- Who else's American child is out here speaking in an Australian accent?

- But was this family of cartoon dogs really changing how children speak?

And how much of a role does TV play in how we learn language?

I'm Dr. Erica Brozovsky, and this is "Otherwords."

(funky upbeat music) - [Narrator] "Otherwords."

- Children are primed to learn language from infancy.

As we covered in our episode on bilingualism, babies can distinguish between the hundreds of phonemes, or distinct sounds, that humans can produce.

But by six months old, they can only identify the sounds used in their native language or languages.

Even though we specialize in our language's phonemes early, our brains still form new pathways for language throughout childhood, starting to understand how phonemes come together to form words and how words come together into phrases, starting around eight months.

Kids don't start stringing together sentences perfectly though.

It takes time for them to pick up all of the patterns of a language's grammar.

That's why you'll sometimes hear a toddler say, "We went to the store," and then as they get older, "We goed to the store."

It's not that they're backsliding their language skills, it's that they're starting to pick up patterns in language.

A child might be able to produce went as a unique standalone word.

But as they understand that adding a suffix ed gives a verb a past tense, kids overgeneralize these patterns, trying goed or even wented.

With enough continued language input, children learn that patterns have exceptions too, and start to use irregular forms like went, took, and ran.

This long iterative process of pattern recognition may play a role in the "Bluey" effect.

When they hear a word on TV like brekky or rubbish, kids pay attention to new linguistic information and try it out in their own speech, especially when a show presents a new word they've never encountered in their own dialect.

Like if the first time they ever see a bell pepper is when their favorite TV character eats a capsicum.

- Ooh, I love capsicum.

(dog barks) - [Erica] But speech language pathologist Melissa James says that over time these unique phrases and pronunciations become part of the big soup of language that kids are using to recognize and form speech patterns of their own.

Kids develop the ability to differentiate between different linguistic codes early on, whether that's between two different languages spoken at home, or even two different accents in the same language.

While they may have fun imitating their favorite characters, at the same time, kids are sorting IRL speech into one category and that as seen on TV dialect into another.

When Peppa Pig says mummy, but their siblings, friends, and teachers say mom, they'll eventually start to replicate the accents and speech patterns of those around them.

So no, those mini Aussie accents aren't permanent.

But that doesn't mean a TV show has no impact on language acquisition.

Take "Sesame Street," a show designed to sneak lessons about letters and numbers in with all those lovable Muppets.

Native English speakers who watched "Sesame Street" regularly at age two scored higher on vocabulary tests than non-viewers.

But it's also effective for kids learning English as a second language.

A study of Hungarian children conducted in the 1980s found that children learning English as a second language improved their vocabularies by watching "Sesame Street" with English subtitles.

The show holds kids' attention while introducing them to new words and pairing them with a clear visual component.

One assessment found that 20% of the words used on the show were matched with a visual reference on screen.

Shows like "Sesame Street" also mimic child-directed speech with simpler sentence structures in a higher, more variable pitch that caregivers use to speak to children.

This parentese style of speaking activates the areas of a baby's brain responsible for listening, but also the motor areas responsible for producing speech.

So that cringey baby talk parents do may have evolved to aid in language acquisition.

Just make sure not to go all-in on the screen time.

One study of two to three-year-old children found that kids who watched more than two hours of TV per day were nearly three times more likely to show language delays.

If TV starts to distract from or replace IRL interaction, kids can miss out on more powerful, personalized language learning time in the form of conversation with an adult speaker.

The biggest language gains may show up in kids who watch child-directed TV shows with a parent or caretaker.

In this scenario, the TV acts much like a picture book where kids can point to things they see on screen, ask questions and practice repeating bits of dialogue with an adult speaker.

TV becomes just another way to foster one-to-one conversation, which is still how kids learn language best.

TV can also work as a language learning tool for adults.

Just like how pairing a visual cue with spoken language helps kids learn, researchers found that adults who watch TV and movies with subtitling turned on scored 17% higher on a test of their English comprehension.

TV also provides adult learners with a different kind of language input than they can get from further education.

Many English language learners from baseball players to K-Pop stars report watching the sitcom "Friends" to improve their English fluency.

With its large back catalog of episodes and casual dialogue, the show gives learners a library of examples of how American English conversations work.

While watching a show won't necessarily give you an American accent, it can provide context for pop culture references, idioms, and how American humor works.

Here, TV works as a great tool for learners to move from the more formal language you might learn from a classroom or a textbook, to more casual conversational speech.

We can't learn a new language from TV alone.

Still, it can be a helpful tool to support language acquisition.

It takes a lot of input and practice to master new linguistic patterns, so being entertained along the way can keep you motivated and engaged in the process.

And if you pick up some fun foreign slang while watching cartoons with your kid... - Look, it's just monkeys singing songs, mate.

Don't think too hard about it.

(Bingo giggling) Oh, Bingo.