Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous studies have shown that infants and toddlers can learn novel symbols, equally well as gestures or words. In Study 1, we test whether toddlers can learn iconic/arbitrary gestures equally well as arbitrary words for familiar objects. The results showed that the toddlers learned only an iconic gesture for top (i.e., spinning) above chance. In Study 2, we tested whether toddlers could learn iconic/arbitrary gestures as labels of actions equally well as novel words. Indeed, they did learn iconic gestures equally well. These results suggest that toddlers associate iconic gestures with actions performed by objects more readily than objects themselves.