The Effect of Iconicity Type on Preschool Children’s Gesture Learning: A Role for Embodiment?

Iconicity, or the similarity between a symbol and its meaning, is found in many languages, especially in sign languages. Children use iconicity to facilitate new word learning, although the age when they seem to reliably leverage iconicity varies from study to study. Previous studies have inconsistently classified iconic gesture type, and this inconsistency may have affected their findings and generalizability. We proposed that children might be differently sensitive to iconic gestures with varying degrees of embodiment. Therefore, we categorized iconic gesture types based on level of embodiment, with gestures differing in terms of action and/or perceptual features. We tested adults (n = 20) and children (n = 81) on their baseline recognition of iconic and non-iconic gestures that represented familiar objects. Then, we taught the same participants three different types of iconic and non-iconic gestures to determine which gesture types were more easily learned. Results indicated that adults were at ceiling in recognizing and learning all iconic gesture types. Fourto five-year-old children were less accurate than adults, but learned all iconic gesture types equally well. Three-year-old children recognized and learned iconic gestures that had higher levels of action-based embodiment than gestures that represented perceptual features. Therefore, children attend to different features of iconicity throughout development, suggesting that embodiment does play a role in children’s ability to learn gestures. EMBODIMENT ON ICONIC GESTURE LEARNING 6 EMBODIMENT ON ICONIC GESTURE LEARNING 7 The Effect of Iconicity Type on Preschool Children’s Gesture Learning: A Role for Embodiment? From birth, children possess the impressive ability to map meaning to linguistic form, rapidly adding new words to their vocabulary; by 13 months of age, babies can comprehend novel words for objects they have never seen before (Woodward, Markman, & Fitzsimmons, 1999). Children’s acquisition of new words is especially remarkable given the arbitrary relationship between most words and their meanings. Although arbitrary symbols prevail in most languages, iconic symbols, which resemble their referents, are present in all languages, spoken or signed (Perniss, Thompson, & Vigliocco, 2010). In spoken languages, iconic symbols often consist of onomatopoeic words, such as the English word woof, in which the word itself mimics the sound associated with the referent to which the word refers. The format of the word, such as the length or number of repeating units contained within it, can also iconically convey meaning (Dingemanse, Blasi, Lupyan, Christiansen, & Monaghan, 2015). For example, the Siwu word dzoro refers to something long, but dzoroo refers to something very long. Likewise, the Japanese word kpata refers to one drop, whereas kpata kpata refers to multiple drops (Dingemanse et al., 2015). However, iconic symbols exist more frequently in sign languages because more concepts can be represented in the visual-manual modality than in the aural-oral modality (van der Hulst & Mills, 1996). Given iconicity’s prevalence across languages, can children recognize iconicity and leverage it in word-learning? In sign languages, iconic symbols often represent visual features of the referent, such as how one interacts with the referent (Figure 1A), the shape of the referent (Figure 1B), or part of the referent (Figure 1C). For example, the sign “HAMMER” in American Sign Language (ASL) depicts the use of a hammer with the hands grasping an imaginary hammer. On the other hand, EMBODIMENT ON ICONIC GESTURE LEARNING 8 signs such as the ASL signs for “HOUSE” and “CAT” depict perceptual shape features of the