Editing Onomatopoeia (section)

== Role in early language acquisition ==
When first exposed to sound and communication, humans are biologically inclined to mimic the sounds they hear, whether they are actual pieces of language or other natural sounds.<ref name=":5">{{Cite journal |last1=Assaneo |first1=María Florencia |last2=Nichols |first2=Juan Ignacio |last3=Trevisan |first3=Marcos Alberto |date=December 14, 2011 |title=The Anatomy of Onomatopoeia |journal=PLOS ONE |volume=6 |issue=12 |pages=e28317 |doi=10.1371/journal.pone.0028317 |issn=1932-6203 |pmc=3237459 |pmid=22194825|bibcode=2011PLoSO...628317A |doi-access=free }}</ref> Early on in development, an infant will vary his/her utterances between sounds that are well established within the phonetic range of the language(s) most heavily spoken in their environment, which may be called "tame" onomatopoeia, and the full range of sounds that the vocal tract can produce, or "wild" onomatopoeia.<ref name=":3" /> As one begins to acquire one's first language, the proportion of "wild" onomatopoeia reduces in favor of sounds which are congruent with those of the language they are acquiring.

During the native language acquisition period, it has been documented that infants may react strongly to the more wild-speech features to which they are exposed, compared to more tame and familiar speech features. But the results of such tests are inconclusive.

In the context of language acquisition, sound symbolism has been shown to play an important role.<ref name=":0" /> The association of foreign words to subjects and how they relate to general objects, such as the association of the words [[Bouba/kiki effect|takete and baluma]] with either a round or angular shape, has been tested to see how languages symbolize sounds.