Onomatopoeic words in early vocabulary

[Elizabeth Bates]

Children tend to start out with the onomatopoeic sounds, which dominate
over animal names in the first 10-50 words or so, and are eventually
replaced.  There are reasons to believe that these first sounds aren't
as productive over contexts as the animal names that come in later.
that is, they are a kind of hybrid or transitional form of speech
that stand somewhere in between 'routines' (like saying/waving bye-bye)
or performatives (something you do, rather than a categorical term
in the usual sense) and 'true names' (used to indicate the presence or
existence of a member of a class, in multiple linguistic and non-linguistic
contexts).  The animal sounds tend to show up in contexts like "How does
the doggie go?", and then are gradually used in a more and more
categorical fashion.  What if children never heard the onomatopoeic sounds?
Good question.  My guess is that they would go through a similar
transition of word use with the animal names themselves, but it would
be harder to detect the transition in this case than it is when there
is a passage from one kind of word to another.  -liz bates