Vroom (and variant spelling) is an onomatopoeia [1] that represents the sound of an engine revving up. [2] It also describes the act of purposefully operating a motor vehicle at high speeds so as to create loud engine noises. [3] The word is a common early childhood sound, and is used in speech therapy techniques. It is also an example of a cross-linguistic onomatopoeia.
According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, the first instance of "vroom" appearing in text was in 1965. [4] Its origin is traced to the United States. [5]
"Vroom" is cited in early childhood language development texts as an example of a common early word or sound made by young children in the course of play. [6] [7] Anthony D. Pellegrini writes in the chapter "Interpreting Children's Play" in the book The Puzzling Child: From Recognition to Treatment (1982): [7]
The social phonological play of two year olds is exemplified by use of conventional noises, through syllable repetition, to identify actions, events, and objects...Two children may be playing parallel or associatively with trucks. Their phonological play would be the vroom sound of truck engines [7]
Julia Gillen further elaborates in the book The Language of Children (2003) that "vroom" and similar sound noises are the earliest examples of speech development:
However, you might look particularly at the accompaniment of words with actions. "Vroom vroom" is a good example…We might not count this as an early word at all; it might be used by a child who is not yet using words but who is consistently using certain vocalization to express specific intentions of feelings. [6]
The word is also used as a tool in treating children with articulation and phonological disorders. Dennis M. Ruscello writes in the book Treating Articulation and Phonological Disorders in Children (2008): [8]
The clinician should encourage vocalizations that can be carried out in the context of body movement or activity. For instance, a client can pair vocalization with play. The clinician and client might play with a favorite toy such as a car and make a vroom sound while playing. [8]
"Vroom" is an example of a cross-linguistic onomatopoeia, in that its pronunciation and imitative qualities are consistent throughout many different languages. [9]
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of speech sounds in written form. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators.
Onomatopoeia is a type of word, or the process of creating a word, that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as oink, meow, roar, and chirp. Onomatopoeia can differ by language: it conforms to some extent to the broader linguistic system. Hence, the sound of a clock may be expressed variously across languages: thus as tick tock in English, tic tac in Spanish and Italian, dī dā in Mandarin, kachi kachi in Japanese, or tik-tik in Hindi and Bengali.
A communication disorder is any disorder that affects an individual's ability to comprehend, detect, or apply language and speech to engage in dialogue effectively with others. This also encompasses deficiencies in verbal and non-verbal communication styles. The delays and disorders can range from simple sound substitution to the inability to understand or use one's native language. This article covers subjects such as diagnosis, the DSM-IV, the DSM-V, and examples like sensory impairments, aphasia, learning disabilities, and speech disorders.
In functional-cognitive linguistics, as well as in semiotics, iconicity is the conceived similarity or analogy between the form of a sign and its meaning, as opposed to arbitrariness. The principle of iconicity is also shared by the approach of linguistic typology.
Pronunciation is the way in which a word or a language is spoken. This may refer to generally agreed-upon sequences of sounds used in speaking a given word or language in a specific dialect or simply the way a particular individual speaks a word or language.
In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them more sonorous. The word lenition itself means "softening" or "weakening". Lenition can happen both synchronically and diachronically. Lenition can involve such changes as voicing a voiceless consonant, causing a consonant to relax occlusion, to lose its place of articulation, or even causing a consonant to disappear entirely.
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds. Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless or voiced.
Phonological awareness is an individual's awareness of the phonological structure, or sound structure, of words. Phonological awareness is an important and reliable predictor of later reading ability and has, therefore, been the focus of much research.
Speech is a human vocal communication using language. Each language uses phonetic combinations of vowel and consonant sounds that form the sound of its words, and using those words in their semantic character as words in the lexicon of a language according to the syntactic constraints that govern lexical words' function in a sentence. In speaking, speakers perform many different intentional speech acts, e.g., informing, declaring, asking, persuading, directing, and can use enunciation, intonation, degrees of loudness, tempo, and other non-representational or paralinguistic aspects of vocalization to convey meaning. In their speech, speakers also unintentionally communicate many aspects of their social position such as sex, age, place of origin, physical states, psychological states, physico-psychological states, education or experience, and the like.
Speech–language pathology (also known as speech and language pathology or logopedics) is a healthcare and academic discipline concerning the evaluation, treatment, and prevention of communication disorders, including expressive and mixed receptive-expressive language disorders, voice disorders, speech sound disorders, speech disfluency, pragmatic language impairments, and social communication difficulties, as well as swallowing disorders across the lifespan. It is an allied health profession regulated by professional bodies including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) and Speech Pathology Australia. The field of speech-language pathology is practiced by a clinician known as a speech-language pathologist (SLP) or a speech and language therapist (SLT). SLPs also play an important role in the screening, diagnosis, and treatment of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), often in collaboration with pediatricians and psychologists.
Clinical linguistics is a sub-discipline of applied linguistics involved in the description, analysis, and treatment of language disabilities, especially the application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language Pathology. The study of the linguistic aspect of communication disorders is of relevance to a broader understanding of language and linguistic theory.
Vroom is a word that phonetically imitates the sound of an engine revving up.
A speech sound disorder (SSD) is a speech disorder affecting the ability to pronounce speech sounds, which includes speech articulation disorders and phonemic disorders, the latter referring to some sounds (phonemes) not being produced or used correctly. The term "protracted phonological development" is sometimes preferred when describing children's speech, to emphasize the continuing development while acknowledging the delay.
Phonological development refers to how children learn to organize sounds into meaning or language (phonology) during their stages of growth.
Because of the nature of onomatopoeia, there are many words which show a similar pronunciation in the languages of the world. The following is a list of some conventional examples:
The Lombard effect or Lombard reflex is the involuntary tendency of speakers to increase their vocal effort when speaking in loud noise to enhance the audibility of their voice. This change includes not only loudness but also other acoustic features such as pitch, rate, and duration of syllables. This compensation effect maintains the auditory signal-to-noise ratio of the speaker's spoken words.
Speech repetition occurs when individuals speak the sounds that they have heard another person pronounce or say. In other words, it is the saying by one individual of the spoken vocalizations made by another individual. Speech repetition requires the person repeating the utterance to have the ability to map the sounds that they hear from the other person's oral pronunciation to similar places and manners of articulation in their own vocal tract.
Speech acquisition focuses on the development of vocal, acoustic and oral language by a child. This includes motor planning and execution, pronunciation, phonological and articulation patterns.
Developmental verbal dyspraxia (DVD), also known as childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and developmental apraxia of speech (DAS), is a condition in which an individual has problems saying sounds, syllables and words. This is not because of muscle weakness or paralysis. The brain has problems planning to move the body parts needed for speech. The individual knows what they want to say, but their brain has difficulty coordinating the muscle movements necessary to say those words.
The dictionary definition of vroom at Wiktionary