Onomatopoeic words in early vocabulary

[Dale, Philip S.]

It's also important to keep in mind substantial linguistic/cultural
differences here. In Japanese, for example, there is a much larger inventory
of onomatopoeic words, and they are used more extensively and longer by both
parents and children. This is well documented in a number of studies, but
most extensively by Ogura in her work developing and norming the Japanese
Early Communicative Inventory.

Philip Dale

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Elizabeth Bates [mailto:bates at crl.ucsd.edu]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2001 9:59 AM
> To: armonls at mail.biu.ac.il; info-childes at mail.talkbank.org
> Subject: Re: Onomatopoeic words in early vocabulary
>
>
> 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
>