Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.