In this review I bring together the literature on onomatopoeia specifically and iconicity more generally to consider infants’ acquisition from three perspectives - perception, production, and interaction.

This study analyses infants’ early word production to show a phonological motivation for onomatopoeia in early acquisition. Cross-linguistic evidence from 16 infants demonstrates how these forms fit within a phonologically-systematic developing lexicon.

An analysis of naturalistic data, observing the productive vocabulary of 44 17‐month‐olds in relation to mothers’ work status (full time, part time, stay at home) at 6 and 18 months. Infants who experienced a combination of care from mothers and other caretakers had larger productive vocabularies than infants in solely full‐time maternal or solely other‐caretaker care

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.

Onomatopoeic words (e.g. quack) were compared acoustically with their corresponding conventional words (duck). Onomatopoeia were more salient than conventional words across all features measured - mean pitch, pitch range, word duration, repetition, and pause length.

An analysis of longitudinal diary data from one infant acquiring German to seek a better understanding of the role of onomatopoeia in early language development across the first 500 words.

This study uses eye-tracking to single out the role of wild onomatopoeia in language development, as described by Rhodes (1994). Wildness – whereby extra-phonetic features are used in order to reproduce non-human sounds – is thought here to facilitate infants’ understanding of onomatopoeic word forms, providing a salient cue for segmentation and understanding in the input. Infants heard onomatopoeic forms produced in familiar and unfamiliar languages, presented in a phonologically wild (W) or tame (T) manner. W forms in both familiar and unfamiliar languages were hypothesised to elicit longer looking times than T forms in both familiar and unfamiliar languages. Results reflect the role that onomatopoeia play in early language development. Wildness was not found to be a factor in infants’ understanding of word forms, while reduplication and production knowledge of specific stimuli generated consistent responses across participants.