MOTHERESE IN DANIEL TIGER’S NEIGHBORHOOD TELEVISION SERIES: A PSYCHOLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

The researcher investigates motherese in Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood television series using a psycholinguistic approach. This research has three objectives: (1) to reveal the characteristics of motherese used in Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood television series based on the syntactic features; (2) to reveal the characteristics of motherese used in Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood television series based on the discourse features; and (3) to describe the functions of the use of motherese in Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood television series.This research employed both qualitative and quantitative methods. The data were in the form of utterances, while the contexts of the data were the adult-children conversations in the series. Meanwhile, the sources of the data were the videos of several episodes of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood television series and their transcript. The data were collected by selecting the dialogues containing motherese. The primary instrument of this research was the researcher, while the secondary instrument was a data sheet. The findings show that there are five characteristics of motherese based on syntactic features which are appeared at Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. First, the MLU of the series is 5.5 which is lower than adult’s MLU. Second, the use of utterances with verb is high, but the form of the verb and modifiers is limited. Third, subordinate clause is rarely being used. Fourth, verbless utterances appear quite often. Fifth, content words are being used more than function words. Meanwhile, for characteristics of motherese based on discourse features, there are 3 of them. First, interrogative and imperative sentences have very high frequency. Second, fluent and intelligible speech does not occur that much in the series. Third, the use of repetitions is really low. Regarding the functions, there are two functions of motherese which can be found in Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. They are analytical function and social function. Analytical function is mostly dominated by the use of primary stress and longer duration on several important words of the utterances. Meanwhile, social function is dominated by the use of higher pitch which indicates that the speech addressed to the children not to adults.

Keywords: psycholinguistics, motherese, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhoood television series