characteristics may cause onomatopoeia to gain infants’ attention more successfully. The present study considers the use of onomatopoeia in IDS, using acoustic analyses of mothers’ interactions with their infants to pinpoint the prosodic characteristics of onomatopoeia in relation to the rest of the input. The analysis will show that onomatopoeia are especially salient; through their limited context in use as a lexical feature of ‘baby talk’, onomatopoeia possess features that render them more salient in the infant input than those words which continue to develop as part of the adult language. These empirical findings prompt us to reconsider the theoretical perspectives posited by Werner and Kaplan (1963) and Imai and Kita (2014), and provide new evidence supporting an input-based approach to infants’ acquisition of onomatopoeia, which corresponds to findings from the wider developmental literature. The current study The goal of this study is to examine the nature of caregivers’ OW production in the early input, through an analysis of the relative salience of OWs in IDS. Based on a sample of parental input to 8-month-old infants, we analyse the prosodic features of onomatopoeic words (OWs, e.g. woof woof) in relation to their equivalent conventional words (CWs, e.g. dog). Here we hypothesise that the status of OWs as ‘sound effect words’ leads them to be prosodically more salient than non-onomatopoeic words. Features that are often cited in the literature as being typical of IDS will be examined (Brent & Siskind, 2001; Fernald & Kuhl, 1987; Soderstrom, 2007); these features are expected to be especially exaggerated in the production of onomatopoeic words. This includes the use of higher pitch and wider pitch range to imitate the sounds in question (for example, meow compared with cat), as well as longer vowels (as in moo or baa) leading to extended word duration. The presence of reduplication in OWs (Ferguson, 1983) is expected to increase the number of individual tokens of these forms in the input (for example, quack is often reduplicated while duck is not
sounds, prosodic effects vary in reference to individual word forms: in fact, a wider pitch range or higher pitch may not always be appropriate. As shown in Figures 5a-c, a particular pitch contour may be implicit in the production of a specific OW, such as monotonal brring brring (telephone) compared with a rising variable pitch in ribbit (frog) or a falling variable pitch in neigh (horse): here we see pitch being used variably to represent the OW in question. This accounts for the variability observed in Figures 1 and 2 above, as well as, to some extent, the use of reduplication in some OWs (e.g. woof woof, quack quack) but not others (e.g. neigh, meow). Insert Figures 5a-c about here Discussion Our results confirm the four hypotheses set out in the introduction: OWs were produced more saliently than their CW counterparts in relation to pitch (both mean pitch and pitch range – Hypothesis 1), duration (Hypothesis 2), frequency (Hypothesis 3) and word isolation (Hypothesis 4). This analysis has thus shown that mothers’ production of OWs is more salient across-the-board than their production of the corresponding CWs. Furthermore, we observed some important trends in the stylistic features of OW production: proximity of pairings was found to be an important feature of OW production, as OWs occurred almost exclusively in close proximity to – often immediately next to – their CW counterpart. Finally, the idiosyncratic nature of individual OW forms and the sound effects that typically accompany them were found to influence the various prosodic features used in mothers’ production of these forms. OWs were found to be more salient than their CW counterparts with regard to both f0 and pitch range, giving OWs special prominence in the infants’ input. However, the analysis of pitch range gave mixed results: while OWs featured wider pitch excursions than their CW counterparts, their increased duration appeared to account for this. Indeed, rate of pitch
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Table 1: OW and CW stimuli used in the analysis Stimulus OW CW ball Bounce/Bouncy/Boing Ball bee Buzz Bee bicycle Bring bring (of bell) Bicycle car Brum/Vroom Car cat Meow Cat cow Moo Cow dog Woof Dog duck Quack Duck(ie) frog Ribbit Frog horse Neigh Horse pig Oink Pig sheep Baa Sheep train Choo choo/Toot toot /Woo woo Train telephone Ring ring Telephone