What is the role of iconicity in early communication?

Iconicity describes the resemblance between a linguistic form and its referent. Words are iconic if they sound like what they mean or if you could potentially guess their meaning without knowing the language from which they come. Onomatopoeias such as 'screech' and 'stomp' and words like 'itty-bitty' are iconic since they sound like what they describe. Studies have shown that children find it easier to learn iconic words and that these are acquired earlier and used disproportionately often by young children and their caregivers. Moreover, caregivers use more iconic forms with infants than with older children and adults. When children are first learning a language, one of the biggest difficulties they face is in establishing referentiality i.e., realizing that words refer to things in the world. One benefit of iconicity is that it can help children identify the thing a new word refers to because the resemblance between form and meaning makes it easier for children to pick out the right referent when they hear a word.

However, the benefit of iconicity might go beyond helping children to establish referentiality. Iconicity has a number of other functions: it allows us to communicate about sensory imagery and better express affective meanings; hearing iconic words results in more vivid perceptions of meaning and iconic words also tend to be rated highly for 'funniness' (think: waddle, flop and zigzag). If iconic words are more emotive, vivid and fun, then perhaps these attributes can account for their prominence in both child-directed speech and infants' early productive vocabularies.

This project will investigate whether iconicity increases infants' motivation to communicate with their caregivers, thereby scaffolding language-learning and facilitating language acquisition. Using both corpus analysis and experimental methods, I will investigate whether increased iconicity in language used by caregivers is associated with heightened infant engagement with objects, whether heightened engagement extends beyond the immediate context of an interaction and whether any heightened engagement leads to increased vocabulary acquisition. The findings will advance theories of language development by further clarifying the role that iconicity plays in early communication. We know that iconicity is prominent in child-directed speech and features disproportionately highly in infants' early productive vocabularies, but it is not yet clear why this is. Furthermore, if iconicity increases children's communicative motivation and therefore leads to accelerated vocabulary acquisition, such findings could be used to develop an intervention programme to address the vocabulary deficit in, for example, children from lower SES backgrounds.