Sep. 13th, 2008

mmcirvin: (Default)
I hadn't known that parents actually blame toddler illeism (the reference to oneself in the third person) on Sesame Street's Elmo. I also didn't know the word "illeism".

I have heard of parents and child-development authorities worrying that exposure to other Sesame Street characters such as Cookie Monster (whose idiolect is, shall we say, highly nonstandard) and Baby Bear (who speaks with an impediment) will delay or warp language development.

Jorie rarely watches Sesame Street, and her exposure to Elmo's speech is mostly through some talking toys--he isn't a significant figure in her life, but she refers to herself as "Jorie" most of the time. She also hasn't yet completely mastered "I"/"you" context shifting when she picks up phrases from us ("I can get you some yogurt" means "give me some yogurt"), and I've always just regarded illeism on our part and hers as a way of working around the resulting ambiguity. I suppose parents who are dead set on stamping out toddler illeism as early as possible could regard Elmo's use of it as an implicit license, but at the moment I see no reason to rush. I'm not that fond of Elmo, but that's just because I was born in 1968 and started watching Sesame Street in '69.

Imitation of TV characters does happen to some degree. I've mentioned earlier that Jorie pronounces certain words with an Australian accent after hearing them on the Wiggles show, which she dearly loves. It tends to be limited to the context of the original phrases, though. For example, in the specific context of making an origami whale out of paper, she pronounces the word "whale" with a vowel that sounds to me like "while", because she heard Murray and Jeff refer to it that way; but I don't think she pronounces "whale" this way in all contexts, not that she has many opportunities to discuss whales. Since she's exposed mostly to a variety of US accents in real-life interactions, I doubt she will actually develop Strine vocabulary to any great degree. I do, however, wonder if she will start talking like a proper inhabitant of the Merrimack Valley after she goes to school.

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