22
C. Research Subjects
The subjects of this research were English children songs containing sound symbolism both in 15 lullabies and 45 play songs. The difference quantity
between lullabies and play songs is by virtue of their cultural background. The two types of songs which are in English were evidently influenced by the culture
existing in English-speaking countries, specifically American in this case. To illustrate, American parents coming from middle class tend to educate their
children to be independent and self-reliant Rogoff, 2003, p. 195. One of the ways to educate them is by providing them their own room to sleep even since
they were still babies, based on Morelli, Rogoff, Oppenheim, and Goldsmith 1992, as cited in Rogoff, 2003, p. 196. It means parents and their children have
no much interaction during the night time, specifically before going to sleep because they sleep apart. That is the reason why the quantity of lullabies found is
not as many as play songs. Further, the researcher took into account any topic as the research subjects
as long as the songs contained sound symbolism. All of the data were taken from various children-content websites on the internet, such as www.dreamenglish.com
and www.singwithourkids.com and a video-specialized website named www.youtube.com
, whose song lyrics were already provided in all of those data sources. In this case, the data taken from www.youtube.com were converted into
MP3 versions. The reason of providing songs in audio versions MP3 only and excluding audio-visual versions video was to stimulate the readers to predict
what sound symbolic words found in lullabies and play songs referred to or
23 represented without any displayed picture. In brief, the collected data consisted of
two forms – audio MP3 and written forms song lyrics. The aim of collecting
both forms is to obtain the conformity between sound symbolic words found in written lyrics and their audio version.
D. Research Instruments and Data Gathering Technique
Since this research applied qualitative research, specifically content analysis as its method, there were two instruments employed here. First, the
researcher played an important role as a human instrument which is a characteristic of qualitative research, as stated by Merriam that
“the researcher is the primary instrument for data collection a
nd data analysis” 2009, p. 15. Thus, the researcher played the major role in interpreting the result of collected data and
analyzed data. The second instrument was two observational tables used to present the data collected by the researcher.
There were two steps in gathering all data for this research in outline. First, the researcher searched English children songs along with their lyrics provided by
various educational websites; in other words, it was the process of transcribing songs. The researcher then sorted them into two types, namely lullabies and play
songs, as stated by Trehub and Trainor 1998. However, the researcher did not limit the topic coverage of songs as long as they met one or more categories of
sound symbolism; its purpose was for enriching the discussion of this research findings.
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