Onomatopoeic words in early vocabulary

[Esther Dromi]

Dear Sharon and her student???

In my CUP book on early lexical development  I discussed all your
questions. I am going to anyway  to shortly  respond to them  again ,
hoping that  it will encourage you to read this book which has examples in
Hebrew. The data of course is naturalistic.( what I can not do here is to
discuss the theoretical most interesting directions  that are relevant to
these findings).

>>(1) Is there any evidence that when a child is given both the animal's
>>name and the sound it produces, she will show preference for one of them?

>During the pre-spurt phase children tend to pick the sound when words and
sounds are prestented to them. They stick with it for a long time sometimes
even for a few months despite the fact that parents consistently produce
the adult animal name only. I, as a mother, responded to animal sounds as
if they were true words but I never used them in isolation to refer to the
referent without coupling it with the conventional name.

You can consider some experiments that were done by Smith and by Woodword
on this issue.

>>(2) What happens if the child is given only names of animals?
>>

Children  need to get the sounds in the input in order to map them  with
their  referents. Children do not make the sounds from no where. The
evidence comes from cross-linguistic differences in the way children refer
by sounds to animals.

In my data I had some baby nonconventional forms that were originated  from
YIDDISH. The source for those words was the caretaker who used them in
interactions with the child. ( Ham, Hita etc...)

>>(3) Would children use first animal names for which they know the
>>onomatopoeic sound?
>>
>>This is the most interesting question. Only towards the end of the
one-word stage( during the last eight weeks of study) Keren replaced old
forms ( non-conventional) with new words ( conventional).Initially she
always produced the conventional word together with the sound or baby form
that she had. Thus, while  looking at a picture of a horse she would say
dio-sus, or sus-dio and never each of them alone...In my 1993 chapter in an
edited volume by Ablex, I discussed the theoretical implications of this
finding. It  is highly relevant to my claim that non-categorical meanings
characterize the first half of the one word stage, but disappear when
children realize through linguistic experience that words name
categories.It is ofcourse also related to the understanding that language
is conventional. See on the Golinkoff, Mervis and Hirshpasek wonderful 1994
JCL publlication.

Etti


Prof. Esther Dromi
Chairperson, Human Development and Education
School of Education
Tel Aviv University
Ramat Aviv , Tel Aviv
Israel 69978

email: dromi at post.tau.ac.il
Fax: 972-3-640-6294