Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study examines three types of vocal iconicity—sound effects, onomatopoeia, and iconic prosody—in Chinese child-directed speech (CDS), adult-directed speech (ADS), and child production. We analyzed a corpus of semi-spontaneous ADS and CDS from forty Chinese mother-child dyads, where the children were 18 and 24 months old. Our findings revealed that (1) mothers used significantly more sound effects and iconic prosody, but not onomatopoeias, in CDS compared to ADS. Interestingly, mothers' iconic prosody was also acoustically more congruent with lexical meanings; (2) The frequency of sound effects was lower than iconic prosody but higher than onomatopoeias; and (3) Chinese children aged 18 or 24 months seldom produced onomatopoeia or iconic prosody. These findings suggest that iconicity is more prevalent and prosodically marked in CDS than in ADS, which may help children's word-to-world mapping. Also, iconic prosody is an advanced prosodic skill that is not typically developed by two-year-old children.