the first five words of 48 infants acquiring a range of ten languages. In another linguistic analysis, Tardif and colleagues (2008) observed that up to 40% of speaking first 10 words were onomatopoeic, compared with just under 30% and 8.7% infants’ of American-English and Mandarin-Chinese early words, respectively. infants’ Despite the general acknowledgement that infants produce a large proportion of onomatopoeia in their early words, few studies have directly considered this aspect of infant speech. Moreover, onomatopoeic forms are often disregarded in the analysis of early infant data (for example, Behrens, 2007; Fikkert & Levelt, 2008), as they are considered to be meaningless or irrelevant when compared with the word forms of the ‘conventional’ developing infant, which continue to progress into the adult language; indeed, few suggestions alternative to that of Werner and Kaplan can be found in the developmental literature. Onomatopoeia in the input It is now widely accepted that language acquisition is led by the input. Phonological development has been shown to be driven by salient features of the ambient language (Vihman, 2010; Vihman & Keren-Portnoy, 2013) that is, features which stand out from or – draw attention to the speech to stream, making certain segments “especially attractive (Fernald & Kuhl, 1987, p.290) as well as by statistical regularities in input speech infants” – (Ambridge et al., 2015; Pierrehumbert, 2003). The effect of onomatopoeia in the input can be seen in the combined findings of two studies by Kauschke and her colleagues (2002, 2007). Kauschke and Hofmeister (2002) show how the infant output responds to the changes in the input: the decrease in use of onomatopoeia can be seen in both and outputs mothers’ infants’ over time. The authors see the production of onomatopoeic words in early language infants’ as a passing phase, as they increase as a proportion of the lexicon over the second year before being replaced by more conventional lexical items. Kauschke and Klann-Delius (2007) see
the first five words of 48 infants acquiring a range of ten languages. In another analysis, Tardif and colleagues (2008) observed that up to 40% of infants’ first 10 words were onomatopoeic, compared with just under 30% and 8.7% of American-English and Mandarin-Chinese infants’ early words, respectively. Despite the general acknowledgement that infants produce a large proportion of onomatopoeia in their early words, few studies have directly considered this aspect of infant speech. Moreover, onomatopoeic forms are often disregarded in the linguistic analysis of early infant data (for example, Behrens, 2007; Fikkert & Levelt, 2008), as they are considered to be meaningless or irrelevant when compared with the ‘conventional’ word forms of the developing infant, which continue to progress into the adult language; indeed, few suggestions alternative to that of Werner and Kaplan can be found in the developmental literature. Onomatopoeia in the input It is now widely accepted that language acquisition is led by the input. Phonological development has been shown to be driven by salient features of the ambient language (Vihman, 2010; Vihman & Keren-Portnoy, 2013) – that is, features which stand out from or draw attention to the speech stream, making certain segments “especially attractive to infants” (Fernald & Kuhl, 1987, p.290) – as well as by statistical regularities in input speech (Ambridge et al., 2015; Pierrehumbert, 2003). The effect of onomatopoeia in the input can be seen in the combined findings of two studies by Kauschke and her colleagues (2002, 2007). Kauschke and Hofmeister (2002) show how the infant output responds to the changes in the input: the decrease in use of onomatopoeia can be seen in both mothers’ and infants’ outputs over time. The authors see the production of onomatopoeic words in infants’ early language as a passing phase, as they increase as a proportion of the lexicon over the second year before being replaced by more conventional lexical items. Kauschke and Klann-Delius (2007) see speaking