In this review I bring together the literature on onomatopoeia specifically and iconicity more generally to consider infants’ acquisition from three perspectives - perception, production, and interaction.
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This study analyses infants’ early word production to show a phonological motivation for onomatopoeia in early acquisition. Cross-linguistic evidence from 16 infants demonstrates how these forms fit within a phonologically-systematic developing lexicon.
An analysis of naturalistic data, observing the productive vocabulary of 44 17‐month‐olds in relation to mothers’ work status (full time, part time, stay at home) at 6 and 18 months. Infants who experienced a combination of care from mothers and other caretakers had larger productive vocabularies than infants in solely full‐time maternal or solely other‐caretaker care
In a picture-mapping task, 10- and 11-month-old infants showed a processing advantage for onomatopoeia (e.g., *woof woof*) over their conventional counterparts (e.g., *doggie*). However, further analysis suggests that the input may play a key role in infants’ experience and processing of these forms.
Onomatopoeic words (e.g. *quack*) were compared acoustically with their corresponding conventional words (*duck*). Onomatopoeia were more salient than conventional words across all features measured - mean pitch, pitch range, word duration, repetition, and pause length.
An analysis of longitudinal diary data from one infant acquiring German to seek a better understanding of the role of onomatopoeia in early language development across the first 500 words.
This study uses eye-tracking to single out the role of *wild* onomatopoeia in language development, as described by Rhodes (1994). Wildness – whereby extra-phonetic features are used in order to reproduce non-human sounds – is thought here to …