Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper examines the use of iconic words in earlyconversations between children and caregivers. Thelongitudinal data include a span of six observations of 35children-parent dyads in the same semi-structured activity.Our findings show that children’s speech initially has a highproportion of iconic words, and over time, these wordsbecome diluted by an increase of arbitrary words. Parents’speech is also initially high in iconic words, with a decreasein the proportion of iconic words over time – in this casedriven by the use of fewer iconic words. The level anddevelopment of iconicity are related to individual differencesin the children’s cognitive skills. Our findings fit with thehypothesis that iconicity facilitates early word learning andmay play an important role in learning to produce new words