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

中文翻译：

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什么是关于标志性的嗡嗡声？看护人讲话中的标志性如何支持儿童的单词学习

可以促进儿童单词学习的一个线索是象似性，或单词的形式和含义之间的对应关系。有些人甚至提出，早期词典中的象似性可能有助于帮助儿童学习如何学习单词，支持甚至非象似性或任意性的习得。, 词参考关联。然而，这个提议仍然未经检验。在这里，我们在具有新颖刺激的自然主义自由游戏会话中调查看护人对幼儿讲话的象似性，并询问看护者讲话的象似性是否有助于儿童学习这些刺激的非标志性小说名称。34 名 1.5-2 岁的孩子（19 名女孩；一半是单语英语学习者，一半是双语英语-西班牙语学习者）与他们的照顾者一起参与了一项自然主义的自由游戏任务，然后进行了单词指称保留测试。我们发现看护者对象似性的使用，特别是在他们命名小说刺激的话语中，与儿童学习该小说名称的可能性有关。即使在控制与单词学习相关的其他因素时，这一结果也成立，例如看护者讲话中词语的具体性和频率。总之，结果表明，象似性不仅可以帮助儿童识别新词的指称（如在以前的研究中），而且还可以支持他们保留甚至非标志性的词-指称映射的能力。