What Is the Buzz About Iconicity? How Iconicity in Caregiver Speech Supports Children's Word Learning

Abstract

One cue that may facilitate children's word learning is iconicity, or the correspondence between a word's form and meaning. Some have even proposed that iconicity in the early lexicon may serve to help children learn how to learn words, supporting the acquisition of even noniconic, or arbitrary, word–referent associations. However, this proposal remains untested. Here, we investigate the iconicity of caregivers’ speech to young children during a naturalistic free‐play session with novel stimuli and ask whether the iconicity of caregivers’ speech facilitates children's learning of the noniconic novel names of those stimuli. Thirty‐four 1.5‐2‐year‐olds (19 girls; half monolingual English learners and half bilingual English‐Spanish learners) participated in a naturalistic free‐play task with their caregivers followed by a test of word‐referent retention. We found that caregivers’ use of iconicity, particularly in utterances in which they named the novel stimuli, was associated with the likelihood that children learned that novel name. This result held even when controlling for other factors associated with word learning, such as the concreteness and frequency of words in caregiver speech. Together, the results demonstrate that iconicity not only can serve to help children identify the referent of novel words (as in previous research) but can also support their ability to retain even noniconic word‐referent mappings.

Do parents modify child-directed signing to emphasize iconicity?

“…For the older children in our sample (age four years and up) parents produced iconic signs for longer than less iconic signs. This finding aligns with prior literature on modifications of child-directed signing ( Perniss et al, 2018 ), and with studies showing that the effect of iconicity on children’s acquisition is greatest among older hearing children (aged 3+; Namy et al, 2004 ; Tolar et al, 2008 ) rather than younger ones (aged 18–24 months; Perry et al, 2021 ).…”

“…For example, if iconic signs are used more frequently with children, their frequency alone-and not their iconicity per se-might account for their overrepresentation in children's early vocabularies. Some have hypothesized that child-directed signing may also include the selection of more iconic signs compared to non-iconic signs (Pizer et al, 2011), and in spoken languages, highly iconic ("sound symbolic") words are more prevalent in child-directed speech than in adult-directed speech (Perry et al, 2015(Perry et al, , 2021.…”

Touch to learn: Multisensory input supports word learning and processing

“…For example, natural languages (in both spoken and signed modalities) exhibit non-arbitrary (iconic) connections between lexical form and meaning ( Dingemanse et al, 2015 ), and that these iconic links have connections with sensorimotor properties of words, with auditory and tactile properties being particularly robust among words that are iconic ( Asano et al, 2015 ; Maurer et al, 2006 ; Winter et al, 2017 ). It seems possible that these iconic links may serve to highlight sensorimotor connections between meanings and words, which, in turn, facilitate vocabulary acquisition ( Caselli & Pyers, 2017 ; Imai et al, 2008 ; Perry et al, 2015 , 2021 ; Sidhu et al, 2022 ; Thompson et al, 2012 ). For example, adult learners are better at mapping ideophones (words that include non-arbitrary sound-symbolic relations) from other languages to their intended meaning rather than to their opposite meaning, suggesting that these connections may boost word mapping.…”

Coordination of Caregiver Naming and Children’s Exploration of Solid Objects and Nonsolid Substances

“…Children’s early word learning experiences are shaped by interactions with their caregivers ( Bruner, 1975 ; Carpenter et al, 1998 ). Many studies reveal that the way in which caregivers name objects matters more for children’s word learning than the number of times that they name them (e.g., Samuelson et al, 2011 ; Yu and Smith, 2012 ; Perry et al, 2021 ). Caregivers will often name and talk about objects that their children are attending to, temporally linking words and referents ( Yu and Smith, 2012 ; Tamis-LeMonda et al, 2014 ; Golinkoff et al, 2015 ).…”