Abstract
Not surprisingly, children expand their linguistic repertoire with the maturation of their cognition
and their daily activities such as watching cartoons influence their language development. Many
if not all parents fear that the Hindi cartoons are contaminating the linguistic repertoire of their
children. Eventually, Pakistan Media Electronic Regularity Authority has banned Hindi dubbed
cartoons. However, it is quite paradoxical that they always wish to improve the English language
skills of their children but they have negative grounding towards the Hindi language. With this
background in minds, the present study was carried out to examine the influence of some popular
Hindi cartoons (such as Doraemon, Motu Patlu, and Chota Bheem) on the phonological
development of children from middle and upper-middle class schools located in Lahore. By
taking the Labovian apparent hypothesis as a theoretical lens, a sample of 84 Urdu/English
bilinguals of different age groups was selected to investigate a prevalence of most commonly
occurring phonological variants (such as /kʰ/ for /x/, /g/ for /ɣ/, / d ʒ/ for /z/, and /f/ for /pʰ/) in
their speech. The study revealed that the influence of the Hindi phonology remained temporary
on the language development of the participants. They were open to the usage of Hindi
phonemes unless they developed alternatives phonological system in their first language (Urdu)
and second and the most prestigious language (English). The participants who were around 10
years of age were found relatively less prone to using the Hindi phones. We may not rule out
completely whether or not the above-mentioned phonological variants were part of their
linguistic repertoire when they reached to puberty. It was observed, on the other hand, that some
low-level phonological variations recycled invariably in the speech of the participants. Hence,
the study suggests investigating these variations beyond this age bracket. The study takes a
diametrically opposite stance and suggests an exposure to multilingual vocabulary as a correlate
of cognitive development during the early childhood education
Ayesha Saddiqa, Muhammad Shaban Rafi. (2019) Influence of Hindi Cartoons on the Language Development of Pakistani Urdu/English Schoolchildren, Balochistan Journal of Linguistics, Volume 7, Issue 1.
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