What is the role of iconicity in early communication?

象似性描述了一种语言形式与其所指事物之间的相似性。如果单词听起来像它们的意思，或者如果你可以在不知道它们来自哪种语言的情况下猜测它们的意思，那么它们就是象征性的。像“尖叫”和“踩踏”这样的拟声词和像“itty-bitty”这样的词都是标志性的，因为它们听起来就像它们所描述的那样。研究表明，儿童发现学习标志性单词更容易，而且这些单词习得更早，而且幼儿和他们的照顾者经常不成比例地使用这些单词。此外，与年龄较大的儿童和成年人相比，照顾者对婴儿使用的标志性形式更多。当儿童刚开始学习一门语言时，他们面临的最大困难之一是建立指代性，即意识到单词指的是世界上的东西。象似性的一个好处是，它可以帮助儿童识别一个新单词所指的东西，因为形式和意义之间的相似之处使儿童在听到一个单词时更容易挑选出正确的指称。然而，象似性的好处可能不仅仅是帮助儿童建立指称关系。象似性还有许多其他功能：它允许我们就感觉意象进行交流，并更好地表达情感意义；听到象征性的词语会让我们更生动地理解意义，而标志性的词语也往往被评为非常有趣的词(想想：摇摇晃晃、扑通和之字形)。如果象征性词汇更情绪化、生动和有趣，那么也许这些属性可以解释它们在儿童指导的言语和婴儿早期产出性词汇中的突出地位。本项目将调查象似性是否增加了婴儿与他们的照顾者交流的动机，从而支撑了语言学习和促进语言习得。使用语料库分析和实验方法，我将调查照顾者使用的语言的象似性是否与婴儿对物体的高度投入有关，是否高投入是否超出了互动的直接背景，以及是否任何高投入导致词汇习得的增加。这些发现将进一步阐明象似性在早期交际中所起的作用，从而推动语言发展理论的发展。我们知道，象似性在儿童导向的言语中非常突出，并且在婴儿早期的产出性词汇中表现出不成比例的高度特征，但原因尚不清楚。此外，如果象似性增加了儿童的交际动机，从而加速了词汇习得，那么这些发现可以被用来制定一个干预计划，以解决例如来自较低社会经济地位背景的儿童的词汇缺陷。

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.