Iconic words imitate their meanings. Previous work has demonstrated that iconic words are more common in infants’ early speech, and in adults’ child-directed speech (e.g., Perry et al., 2015; 2018). This is consistent with the proposal that iconicity provides a benefit to word learning. Here we explored iconicity in four diverse language development datasets: a production corpus for infants and preschoolers (MacWhinney, 2000), comprehension data for school-aged children to young adults (Dale & O'Rourke, 1981), word frequency norms from educational texts for school aged children to young adults (Zeno et al., 1995), and a database of parent-reported infant word production (Frank et al., 2017). In all four analyses, we found that iconic words were more common at younger ages. We also explored how this relationship differed by syntactic class, finding only modest evidence for differences. Overall, the results suggest that, beyond infancy, iconicity is an important factor in language acquisition.

中文翻译：

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四个数据集中标志性语言发展的调查

标志性的词模仿它们的含义。先前的研究表明，标志性词语在婴儿早期言语和成人面向儿童的言语中更为常见（例如，Perry 等人，2015；2018）。这与象似性为单词学习提供好处的提议是一致的。在这里，我们探讨了四个不同语言发展数据集的象似性：婴儿和学龄前儿童的生产语料库 (MacWhinney, 2000)、学龄儿童到年轻人的理解数据 (Dale & O'Rourke, 1981)、来自教育文本的词频规范适用于学龄儿童到年轻人（Zeno et al., 1995），以及家长报告的婴儿单词生成数据库（Frank et al., 2017）。在所有四项分析中，我们发现标志性词在年轻时更常见。我们还探讨了这种关系如何因句法类而不同，只找到适度的差异证据。总体而言，结果表明，在婴儿期之外，象似性是语言习得的一个重要因素。