Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Motivated form-meaning mappings are pervasive in signlanguages, and iconicity has recently been shown to facilitatesign learning from early on. This study investigated the role oficonicity for language acquisition in Turkish Sign Language(TID). Participants were 43 signing children (aged 10 to 45months) of deaf parents. Sign production ability was recordedusing the adapted version of MacArthur Bates CommunicativeDevelopmental Inventory (CDI) consisting of 500 items forTID. Iconicity and familiarity ratings for a subset of 104 signswere available. Our results revealed that the iconicity of a signwas positively correlated with the percentage of childrenproducing a sign and that iconicity significantly predicted thepercentage of children producing a sign, independent offamiliarity or phonological complexity. Our results areconsistent with previous findings on sign language acquisitionand provide further support for the facilitating effect of iconicform-meaning mappings in sign learning.