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, such effects result from human-specific perceptive and cognitive biases and can be thus universal. This paper tests the sensibility to ideophones (a type of sound-symbolic words) by children acquiring Spanish, a language lacking this word class. Results show that younger children are mostly insensitive to sound-symbolic effects as found in ideophones, but that this sensibility emerges and improves with age. Also, children were found to 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 although we might be endowed with a special sensitivity to sound-symbolic effects, this sensitivity does not provide a very large advantage when learning a language and/or a minimal amount of exposure to the phenomena to be acquired is necessary to put it effectively into use.