Language development beyond the here-and-now: iconicity and displacement in child-directed communication

Abstract

Most language use is displaced, referring to past, future or hypothetical events. Displacement poses an important challenge for language learning. How can children learn what words refer to when the referent is not physically available? We suggest that caregivers provide children with iconic vocal and gestural cues that imagistically evoke properties of absent referents to support displaced learning. We collected an audio-visual corpus of English-speaking caregiver-child interactions (N = 71, 24-58 months, 37 female) and annotated the range of vocal and manual behaviours caregivers produced. We found that caregivers used iconic cues especially in displaced contexts, using other cues when objects were present. Thus, we map caregivers’ non-linguistic behaviours, showing that they provide iconic cues to support displaced language learning and processing.

What made us “hunter-gatherers of words”

“…Of course, the adoption of truly symbolic tokens of communication does not imply that iconic and indexical traits were banished from language. Such properties are extremely useful as trust is being built in the course of language acquisition (Imai and Kita, 2014 ), and their presence in modern languages indicate that they continue to fulfill an important supportive role in communication (Perniss et al, 2010 ; Cuskley, 2013 ; Perlman and Cain, 2014 ; Perlman et al, 2015 ; Filippi, 2016 ; Perlman, 2017 ; Motamedi et al, 2022 ). But still, words qua symbols may have shifted the balance between different modalities at work in language, giving more prominence perhaps to the vocal modality, which is particularly amenable to an organization captured by the concept of “duality of patterning” (De Boer et al, 2012 ), compared to other modalities that have stronger iconic connections.…”

Consensus Paper: Situated and Embodied Language Acquisition

“…The situated physical context describes to what extent the learning and processing of language is supported by information in the "here and now". Most research on early word learning assumes that the learning occurs only when the actual referent, an object or an action, is present or unfolding while the corresponding word is produced by a caregiver (but see Motamedi et al, 2022). When the physical context is cluttered (i.e., the child may be experiencing several objects unknown to them when a specific label is used), mechanisms such as cross-situational learning (Smith et al, 2007) may support the child to learn new words present in the scene.…”

“…The physical presence of the objects, or events, talked about is not strictly necessary to achieve grounding, however. When talking about something displaced, the caregiver imagistically brings attention to the referents by using iconic vocalisations and gestures that imagistically resemble sensorimotor properties of referents (Motamedi et al, 2022). The use of iconic behaviours can provide a powerful tool to ensure that the grounding is possible even when the actual referents are not present in the physical setting (Motamedi et al, 2022;Murgiano et al, 2021).…”

Loquens : A characterization of “Hunter-Gatherers of Words”

“…Of course, the adoption of truly symbolic tokens of communication does not imply that iconic and indexical traits were banished from language. Such properties are extremely useful as trust is being built in the course of language acquisition (Imai and Kita, 2014), and their presence in modern languages indicate that they continue to fulfill an important supportive role in communication (Perlman et al, 2015;Perlman and Cain, 2014;Perlman, 2017;Perniss et al, 2010;Cuskley, 2013;Filippi, 2016;Motamedi et al, 2022). But still, words qua symbols may have shifted the balance between different modalities at work in language, giving more prominence perhaps to the vocal modality, which is particularly amenable to an organization captured by the concept of "duality of patterning" (De Boer et al, 2012), compared to other modalities that have strong iconic connections.…”