The Use of Onomatopoeia in Child Language Learning. It is Useful or Just for Fun?

Abstract

Most of children go from uttering their first words in their first years, to fluent readers and writers of their first language, whereby language skills begin to develop in children’s first years, either with the help of adults and peers in environment and home or independently with their mental ability or social interactions. Therefore, this present study attempts to investigate the use of onomatopoeia in child’s language learning and its effect on language development of children in which skills of questioning, analysing and synthesising, are encouraged. It aims at finding whether onomatopoeia has an effect on child’s language learning which could develop their phonological and morphological patterns. Furthermore, it examines if onomatopoeia could facilitate the child’s language learning and how the early productive vocabulary of children could be onomatopoeic which helps them to improve their pronunciation. Hence, it is hypothesised in this paper that the child at an early age perhaps would receive and produce so many words by using onomatopoeic words which became their early productive words in child directed speech. However, to confirm or disconfirm these hypotheses two data collection tools are presented, an interview conducted to caregivers in one of the Algerian communities.