4 ms·

I live in an area where the prevailing accent is a flat US midwestern one, and watching Bluey has led my toddler to derhoticize her R's some of the time. (The

by mbg721 2y ago

I live in an area where the prevailing accent is a flat US midwestern one, and watching Bluey has led my toddler to derhoticize her R's some of the time. (The sound ends up like a muddled Australian-Boston mix.) I assume the reverse happens all the time with kids from other countries who see American TV, but it's something amusing that I didn't expect. Her mom and I are both unable to roll R's, so I wonder if playing a lot of Spanish audio will help her be able to do so.

thriftwy 2y ago
Babies only learn to roll their Rs when four years old, where the phoneme is present in the language. So likely no :)
- throw-the-towel 2y ago
  Or even later! I had to be taught this about age 6, while some never learn the trick.
jajko 2y ago
[flagged]
- mbg721 2y ago
  Sure, why not? We have a bedtime ritual of physical books every night, her mom takes her outside to play daily, and she gets extra playground time on the weekends. She's a regular kid, it's just that a lot of her screen voices are 'Strayan, and that's what's captivating her right now.
  - skrebbel 2y ago
    You really don’t need to defend yourself, GP comment is a shit take and nobody on the internet gets to second-guess your parenting like that.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- another-dave 2y ago
  You'd be surprised how little exposure toddlers need in order to be able to mimic if it's caught their interest
  - batch12 2y ago
    I think it's more damaging to force children to be psychiatrists. Why can't they just be children?
rdtsc 2y ago
I heard of the same phenomenon happening with Peppa Pig: American kids all of the sudden acquiring British accents after watching the cartoon for a long enough time.
theGnuMe 2y ago
Yep it will.
vanderZwan 2y ago
> I wonder if playing a lot of Spanish audio will help her be able to do so. TL;DR: possibly, but they also learn to speak Spanish a little bit if you want to be really sure. Well, apparently babies start out being able to distinguish all sounds human languages make, and lose the ability to distinguish them as they specialize in the ones that the people in their surroundings speak (same with distinguishing human faces actually). And if a child grows up multi-lingual, especially if it is very early in their development, the ability to distinguish the sounds will "stick" even if they stop using the language. I actually have some personal experience with that. According to my parents I spoke Spanish (among other languages) with the nuns running the hospital in Ghana, where my parents worked when I was a toddler. Then we returned to the Netherlands when I was almost four. This is right around the time childhood amnesia[0] is doing its thing. So I completely forgot how to speak Spanish, as well as the local Ghanaian languages that I allegedly also I spoke. A few decades later, and completely unaware of this childhood experience, I dated a Spanish-Dutch woman, who also studied Spanish at the university. One time she got a Spanish joke book at her birthday party from her friends. So I said "I'm going to torture your ears with my horrible fake Spanish accent now". One (sadly, horribly unfunny) joke reading later the reaction was "is the joke that your fake Spanish sounds better than most second-year students in our bachelor?" And they were serious about it too. (Another decade later I dated a Spanish woman who said that my Spanish accent still was pretty off, but of course she didn't have the horrible accent of Dutch first- and second-year students of Spanish as a comparison point. She approved of my rolling Rs though) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia

by mbg721 2y ago

thriftwy 2y ago

Babies only learn to roll their Rs when four years old, where the phoneme is present in the language. So likely no :)

throw-the-towel 2y ago
Or even later! I had to be taught this about age 6, while some never learn the trick.

jajko 2y ago

[flagged]

mbg721 2y ago
Sure, why not? We have a bedtime ritual of physical books every night, her mom takes her outside to play daily, and she gets extra playground time on the weekends. She's a regular kid, it's just that a lot of her screen voices are 'Strayan, and that's what's captivating her right now.
- skrebbel 2y ago
  You really don’t need to defend yourself, GP comment is a shit take and nobody on the internet gets to second-guess your parenting like that.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
another-dave 2y ago
You'd be surprised how little exposure toddlers need in order to be able to mimic if it's caught their interest
- batch12 2y ago
  I think it's more damaging to force children to be psychiatrists. Why can't they just be children?

rdtsc 2y ago

I heard of the same phenomenon happening with Peppa Pig: American kids all of the sudden acquiring British accents after watching the cartoon for a long enough time.

theGnuMe 2y ago

Yep it will.

vanderZwan 2y ago

> I wonder if playing a lot of Spanish audio will help her be able to do so. TL;DR: possibly, but they also learn to speak Spanish a little bit if you want to be really sure. Well, apparently babies start out being able to distinguish all sounds human languages make, and lose the ability to distinguish them as they specialize in the ones that the people in their surroundings speak (same with distinguishing human faces actually). And if a child grows up multi-lingual, especially if it is very early in their development, the ability to distinguish the sounds will "stick" even if they stop using the language. I actually have some personal experience with that. According to my parents I spoke Spanish (among other languages) with the nuns running the hospital in Ghana, where my parents worked when I was a toddler. Then we returned to the Netherlands when I was almost four. This is right around the time childhood amnesia[0] is doing its thing. So I completely forgot how to speak Spanish, as well as the local Ghanaian languages that I allegedly also I spoke. A few decades later, and completely unaware of this childhood experience, I dated a Spanish-Dutch woman, who also studied Spanish at the university. One time she got a Spanish joke book at her birthday party from her friends. So I said "I'm going to torture your ears with my horrible fake Spanish accent now". One (sadly, horribly unfunny) joke reading later the reaction was "is the joke that your fake Spanish sounds better than most second-year students in our bachelor?" And they were serious about it too. (Another decade later I dated a Spanish woman who said that my Spanish accent still was pretty off, but of course she didn't have the horrible accent of Dutch first- and second-year students of Spanish as a comparison point. She approved of my rolling Rs though) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia