Languages are highly complex
systems and yet most children seem to acquire language easily, even in the
absence of formal instruction. New research on young children's use of British
Sign Language (BSL) sheds light on one of the mechanisms - iconicity -
that may endow children with this amazing ability.
For spoken and written language, the arbitrary relationship
between a word's form – how it sounds or how it looks on paper – and its
meaning is a particularly challenging feature of language acquisition. But one
of the first things people notice about sign languages is that signs often
represent aspects of meaning in their form. For example, in BSL the sign EAT
involves bringing the hand to the mouth just as you would if you were bringing
food to the mouth to eat it.
In fact, a high proportion of
signs across the world's sign languages are similarly iconic, connecting human
experience to linguistic form.
Robin Thompson and colleagues
David Vison, Bencie Woll, and Gabriella Vigliocco at the Deafness, Cognition
and Language Research Centre (DCAL) at University College London in the United
Kingdom wanted to examine whether this kind of iconicity might provide a key to
understanding how children come to link words to their meaning.
Their findings are published
in Psychological
Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
The researchers looked at data
from 31 deaf children who
were being raised in deaf BSL signing families in the United Kingdom. Parents
indicated the number of words understood and produced by their children between
the ages of 8 and 30 months. The researchers decided to focus on 89 specific
signs, examining children's familiarity with
the signs as well as the iconicity and complexity of the signs.
The findings reveal that younger
(11-20 months) and older (21-30 months) children comprehended and produced more
BSL signs that were iconic than those that were less iconic. And the benefit of
iconicity seemed to be greater for the older children. Importantly, this
relationship did not seem to depend on how familiar, complex or concrete the words
were.
Together, these findings suggest
that iconicity could play an important role in language acquisition.
Thompson and colleagues
hypothesize that iconic links between our perceptual-motor experience of the
world and the form of a sign may provide an imitation-based mechanism that
supports early sign acquisition. These iconic links highlight motor and
perceptual similarity between actions and signs such as DRINK, which is produced
by tipping a curved hand to the mouth and represents the action of holding a
cup and drinking from it.
The researchers emphasize that
these results can also be applied to spoken languages, in which gestures, tone
of voice, inflection, and face-to-face communication can help make the link
between words and their meanings less arbitrary.
"We suggest that iconicity
provides scaffolding – a middle-ground – to bridge the "great divide"
between linguistic form and bodily experience for both sign language and spoken
language learners," says Thompson.
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