What Is the Buzz About Iconicity? How Iconicity in Caregiver Speech Supports Children's Word Learning

Abstract One cue that may facilitate children's word learning is iconicity, or the correspondence between a word's form and meaning. Some have even proposed iconicity in early lexicon serve to help children learn how words, supporting acquisition of noniconic, arbitrary , word–referent associations. However, this proposal remains untested. Here, we investigate caregivers’ speech young during naturalistic free‐play session with novel stimuli ask whether facilitates noniconic names those stimuli. Thirty‐four 1.5‐2‐year‐olds (19 girls; half monolingual English learners bilingual English‐Spanish learners) participated task their caregivers followed by test word‐referent retention. We found use particularly utterances which they named stimuli, was associated likelihood learned name. This result held when controlling for other factors learning, such as concreteness frequency words caregiver speech. Together, results demonstrate not only can identify referent (as previous research) but also support ability retain mappings.