Understanding how children acquire language remains a challenge of language research. Most research assumes that labeland referent are linked by arbitrary convention alone. However, in addition to being indisputably arbitrary, language isalso iconic. Recent evidence has shown that children are sensitive to iconic mappings and that these may bootstrap wordacquisition. However, we know little about the presence of iconicity in the language input children are exposed to. Thistalk focuses on iconicity in English CDL across vocal and visual channels: phonology (meow), prosody (loooooong),gestures (stirring) and hand actions (stirring with spoon). We discuss evidence that caregivers exploit iconicity in CDL,and use iconicity differentially depending on whether referents talked about are present or not, and familiar or not to thechild. An analysis of the type and amount of iconicity used in CDL is crucial for understanding the role of iconicity insupporting referential mapping.

We present an experimental study that examines how lexical iconicity (i.e. onomatopoeia) affects early word learning,across learning contexts. Children aged 24-36 months (N=37) were first trained on labels that are either iconic or neutralwith respect to the referent event, and then tested using a forced-choice task to select the correct referent given a label. Weassessed learning across two contexts: situated, where label and referent co-occur, and displaced, where children learn thelabel following the referent event. We predicted that iconicity would aid word learning, and would have a more facilitatoryeffect in the displaced condition, helping the child to associate label and referent. Our findings demonstrate that childrenlearn iconic labels in the experiment better than they do neutral labels. However, we find no difference across learningcontextsiconicity facilitates word learning in both situated and displaced learning scenarios.

Most research on how children learn the mapping betweenwords and world has assumed that language is arbitrary, andhas investigated language learning in contexts in which objectsreferred to are present in the environment. Here, we reportanalyses of a semi-naturalistic corpus of caregivers talking totheir 2-3 year-old. We focus on caregivers’ use of non-arbitrarycues across different expressive channels: both iconic(onomatopoeia and representational gestures) and indexical(points and actions with objects). We ask if these cues are useddifferently when talking about objects known or unknown tothe child, and when the referred objects are present or absent.We hypothesize that caregivers would use these cues moreoften with objects novel to the child. Moreover, they would usethe iconic cues especially when objects are absent becauseiconic cues bring to the mind’s eye properties of referents. Wefind that cue distribution differs: all cues except points are morecommon for unknown objects indicating their potential role inlearning; onomatopoeia and representational gestures are morecommon for displaced contexts whereas indexical cues aremore common when objects are present. Thus, caregiversprovide multimodal non-arbitrary cues to support children’svocabulary learning and iconicity – specifically – can supportlinking mental representations for objects and labels.