{"id":767,"date":"2008-11-20T15:55:54","date_gmt":"2008-11-20T14:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/20\/mimetic-bootstrapping\/"},"modified":"2008-11-20T15:55:54","modified_gmt":"2008-11-20T14:55:54","slug":"mimetic-bootstrapping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=767","title":{"rendered":"Mimetic bootstrapping"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday I went to an interesting talk on Japanese mimetic words, which are onomatopoeia (\u64ec\u58f0\u8a9e giseigo \/ \u64ec\u97f3\u8a9e giongo) or words connected to actions, emotions or states (\u64ec\u614b\u8a9e gitaigo). For example, \u304f\u3059\u304f\u3059 (kusu kusu) &#8211; to giggle,\u3050\u305a\u3050\u305a[\u3059\u308b] (guzu guzu [suru]) &#8211; to procrastinate or dawdle.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers in Japan have found that Japanese mothers use a much higher proportion of mimetic words with young children (60%) than with adults (10%), and their experiments found that children find mimetic verbs (those that use sound symbolism) easier to learn than non-mimetic verbs. They call this process mimetic bootstrapping. They also tested English-speaking children and adults using Japanese mimetic verbs and found that they were able to guess their meanings above the level of chance.<\/p>\n<p>They also mentioned that mimetic words are not just found in Japanese &#8211; they are in fact found in the form similar to <em>gitaigo<\/em> in many of the worlds languages, though are rare in Indo-European languages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday I went to an interesting talk on Japanese mimetic words, which are onomatopoeia (\u64ec\u58f0\u8a9e giseigo \/ \u64ec\u97f3\u8a9e giongo) or words connected to actions, emotions or states (\u64ec\u614b\u8a9e gitaigo). For example, \u304f\u3059\u304f\u3059 (kusu kusu) &#8211; to giggle,\u3050\u305a\u3050\u305a[\u3059\u308b] (guzu guzu [suru]) &#8211; to procrastinate or dawdle. Researchers in Japan have found that Japanese mothers use a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,129,10,132,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-japanese","category-language","category-language-acquisition","category-linguistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}