Sensitivity to ideophones by child non-native speakers increases with age

Sound-symbolic effects have been claimed to facilitate word learning, because of the motivated relationship between form and meaning. According to some views, these effects result from human perceptive and cognitive biases and can be thus universal. This paper tests the sensibility to ideophones (a type of sound-symbolic word) by children acquiring Spanish, a language without this word class. Results show that younger children might lack such a special sensitivity to sound-symbolic effects as found in ideophones, although this sensitivity improves with age. Also, they perform better in tasks involving verbal responses compared to visual tasks. By contrast, no effect of sex or the type of ideophone on success rates was observed. Overall, these results support the view that even if we are eventually endowed with a special sensitivity to sound-symbolic effects, this sensitivity does not provide a very large advantage when learning a language.