A perceptual advantage for onomatopoeia in early word learning: Evidence from eye-tracking

•Infants show a perceptual advantage for onomatopoeic over non-onomatopoeic words.•This is dependent on words which are reported as most familiar to the infant.•Results suggest a role for iconicity in real-world language learning.•Other factors, such as prosodic salience, may also be important in these results.

A perceptual advantage for iconic forms in infant language learning has been widely reported in the literature, termed the “sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis” by Imai and Kita (2014). However, empirical research in this area is limited mainly to sound symbolic forms, which are very common in languages such as Japanese but less so in Indo-European languages such as English. In this study, we extended this body of research to onomatopoeia-words that are thought to be present across most of the world's languages and that are known to be dominant in infants' early lexicons. In a picture-mapping task, 10- and 11-month-old infants showed a processing advantage for onomatopoeia (e.g., woof woof) over their conventional counterparts (e.g., doggie). However, further analysis suggests that the input may play a key role in infants' experience and processing of these forms.