Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Most research on how children learn the mapping betweenwords and world has assumed that language is arbitrary, andhas investigated language learning in contexts in which objectsreferred to are present in the environment. Here, we reportanalyses of a semi-naturalistic corpus of caregivers talking totheir 2-3 year-old. We focus on caregivers’ use of non-arbitrarycues across different expressive channels: both iconic(onomatopoeia and representational gestures) and indexical(points and actions with objects). We ask if these cues are useddifferently when talking about objects known or unknown tothe child, and when the referred objects are present or absent.We hypothesize that caregivers would use these cues moreoften with objects novel to the child. Moreover, they would usethe iconic cues especially when objects are absent becauseiconic cues bring to the mind’s eye properties of referents. Wefind that cue distribution differs: all cues except points are morecommon for unknown objects indicating their potential role inlearning; onomatopoeia and representational gestures are morecommon for displaced contexts whereas indexical cues aremore common when objects are present. Thus, caregiversprovide multimodal non-arbitrary cues to support children’svocabulary learning and iconicity – specifically – can supportlinking mental representations for objects and labels.