Previous research found that iconicity—the motivated correspondence between word form and meaning—contributes to expressive vocabulary acquisition. We present two new experiments with two different databases and with novel analyses to give a detailed quantification of how iconicity contributes to vocabulary acquisition across development, including both receptive understanding and production. The results demonstrate that iconicity is more prevalent early in acquisition and diminishes with increasing age and with increasing vocabulary. In the first experiment, we found that the influence of iconicity on children’s production vocabulary decreased gradually with increasing age. These effects were independent of the observed influence of concreteness, difficulty of articulation, and parental input frequency. Importantly, we substantiated the independence of iconicity, concreteness, and systematicity—a statistical regularity between sounds and meanings. In the second experiment, we found that the average iconicity of both a child’s receptive vocabulary and expressive vocabulary diminished dramatically with increases in vocabulary size. These results indicate that iconic words tend to be learned early in the acquisition of both receptive vocabulary and expressive vocabulary. We recommend that iconicity be included as one of the many different influences on a child’s early vocabulary acquisition. Facing the logically insurmountable challenge to link the form of a novel word (e.g., “gavagai”) with its particular meaning (e.g., “rabbit”; Quine, 1960, 1990/1992), children manage to learn words with incredible ease. Interest in this process has permeated empirical and theoretical research in developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, and language studies more generally. Investigators have studied which words are learned and when they are learned (Fenson et al., 1994), biases in word learning (Markman, 1990, 1991); the perceptual, social, and linguistic properties of the words (Gentner, 1982; Waxman, 1999; Maguire et al., 2006; Vosoughi et al., 2010), the structure of the language being learned (Gentner and Boroditsky, 2001), and the influence of the child’s milieu on word learning (Hart and Risley, 1995; Roy et al., 2015). A growing number of studies also show that the iconicity of words might be a significant factor in word learning (Imai and Kita, 2014; Perniss and Vigliocco, 2014; Perry et al., 2015). Iconicity refers generally to a correspondence between the form of a signal (e.g., spoken word, sign, and written character) and its meaning. For example, the sign for tree is iconic in many signed languages: it resembles a branching tree waving above the ground in American Sign Language, outlines the shape of a tree in Danish Sign Language and forms a tree trunk in Chinese Sign Language. In contrast to signed languages, the words of spoken languages have traditionally been treated as arbitrary, with the assumption that the forms of most words bear no resemblance to their meaning (e.g., Hockett, 1960; Pinker and Bloom, 1990). However, there is now a large body of research showing that iconicity is prevalent in the lexicons of many spoken languages (Nuckolls, 1999; Dingemanse et al., 2015). Most languages have an inventory of iconic words for sounds—onomatopoeic words such as splash, slurp, and moo, which sound somewhat like the sound of the real-world event to which they refer. Rhodes (1994), for example, counts more than 100 of these words in English. Many languages also contain large inventories of ideophones—a distinctively iconic class of words that is used to express a variety of sensorimotor-rich meanings (Nuckolls, 1999; Voeltz and Kilian-Hatz, 2001; Dingemanse, 2012). For example, in Japanese, the word “koron”—with a voiceless [k] refers to a light object rolling once, the reduplicated “korokoro” to a light object rolling repeatedly, and “gorogoro”—with a voiced [g]—to a heavy object rolling repeatedly (Imai and Kita, 2014). And in Siwu, spoken in Ghana, ideophones include words like fwεfwε “springy, elastic” and saaa “cool sensation” (Dingemanse et al., 2015). Outside of onomatopoeia and ideophones, there is also evidence that adjectives and verbs—which also tend to convey sensorimotor imagery—are also relatively iconic (Nygaard et al., 2009; Perry et al., 2015). Another domain of iconic words involves some correspondence between the point of articulation of a word and its meaning. For example, there appears to be some prevalence across languages of nasal consonants in words for nose and bilabial consonants in words for lip (Urban, 2011). Spoken words can also have a correspondence between a word’s meaning and other aspects of its pronunciation. The word teeny, meaning small, is pronounced with a relatively small vocal tract, with high front vowels characterized by retracted lips and a high-frequency second formant (Ohala, 1994). Thus, teeny can be recognized as iconic of “small” (compared to the larger vocal tract configuration of the back, rounded vowel in huge), a pattern that is documented in the lexicons of a diversity of languages (Ultan, 1978; Blasi et al., 2016). Lewis and Frank (2016) have studied a more abstract form of iconicity that more meaningfully complex words tend to be longer. An evaluation of many diverse languages revealed that conceptually more complex meanings tend to have longer spoken forms. In their study, participants tended to assign a relatively long novel word to a conceptually more complex referent. Understanding that more complex meaning is usually represented by a longer word could aid a child’s parsing of a stream of spoken language and thus facilitate word learning. Some developmental psychologists have theorized that iconicity helps young children learn words by “bootstrapping” or “bridging” the association between a symbol and its referent (Imai and Kita, 2014; Perniss and Vigliocco, 2014). According to this idea, children begin to master word learning with the aid of iconic cues, which help to profile the connection between the form of a word and its meaning out in the world. The learning of verbs in particular may benefit from iconicity, as the referents of verbs are more abstract and challenging for young children to identify (Gentner, 1982; Snedeker and Gleitman, 2004). By helping children gain a firmer grasp of the concept of a symbol, iconicity might set the stage for the ensuing word-learning spurt of non-iconic words. The hypothesis that iconicity plays a role in word learning is supported by experimental studies showing that young children are better at learning words—especially verbs—when they are iconic (Imai et al., 2008; Kantartzis et al., 2011; Yoshida, 2012). In one study, for example, 3-year-old Japanese children were taught a set of novel verbs for actions. Some of the words the children learned were iconic (“sound-symbolic”), created on the basis of iconic patterns found in Japanese mimetics (e.g., the novel word nosunosu for a slow manner of walking; Imai et al., 2008). The results showed that children were better able to generalize action words across agents when the verb was iconic of the action compared to when it was not. A subsequent study also using novel verbs based on Japanese mimetics replicated the finding with 3-year-old English-speaking children (Kantartzis et al., 2011). However, it remains to be determined whether children trained in an iconic condition can generalize their learning to a non-iconic condition that would not otherwise be learned. Children as young as 14 months of age have been shown to benefit from iconicity in word learning (Imai et al., 2015). These children were better at learning novel words for spikey and rounded shapes when the words were iconic, corresponding to kiki and bouba sound symbolism (e.g., Köhler, 1947; Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001). If iconic words are indeed easier to learn, there should be a preponderance of iconic words early in the learning of natural languages. There is evidence that this is the case in signed languages, which are widely recognized to contain a prevalence of iconic signs [Klima and Bellugi, 1979; e.g., as evident in Signing Savvy (2016)]. Although the role of iconicity in sign acquisition has been disputed [e.g., Orlansky and Bonvillian, 1984; see Thompson (2011) for discussion], the most thorough study to date found that signs of British Sign Language (BSL) that were learned earlier by children tended to be more iconic (Thompson et al., 2012). Thompson et al.’s measure of the age of acquisition of signs came from parental reports from a version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI; Fenson et al., 1994) adapted for BSL (Woolfe et al., 2010). The iconicity of signs was taken from norms based on BSL signers’ judgments using a scale of 1 (not at all iconic) to 7 [highly iconic; see Vinson et al. (2008), for norming details and BSL videos]. Thompson et al. (2012) found a positive correlation between iconicity judgments and words understood and produced. This relationship held up even after controlling for the contribution of imageability and familiarity. Surprisingly, however, there was a significantly stronger correlation for older children (21- to 30-month olds) than for younger children (age 11- to 20-month olds). Thompson et al. suggested that the larger role for iconicity for the older children may result from their increasing cognitive abilities or their greater experience in understanding meaningful form-meaning mappings. However, this suggestion does not fit with the expectation that iconicity should play a larger role earlier in language use. Thus, although supporting a role for iconicity in word learning, the larger influence for older children is inconsistent with the bootstrapping hypothesis, in which iconicity should play a larger role earlier in vocabulary learning (Imai and Kita, 2014; Perniss and Vigliocco, 2014). There is also evidence in spoken languages that earlier learned words tend to be more iconic. Perry et al. (2015) collected iconicity ratings on the roughly 600 English and Spanish words that are learned earliest by children, selected from their respective MCDIs. Native speakers on Amazon Mechanical Turk rated the iconicity of the words on a scale from −5 to 5, where 5 indicated that a word was highly iconic, −5 that it sounded like the opposite of its meaning, and 0 that it was completely arbitrary. Their instructions to raters are given in the Appendix because the same instructions were used for acquiring our iconicity ratings. The Perry et al. (2015) results showed that the likelihood of a word in children’s production vocabulary in both English and Spanish at 30 months was positively correlated with the iconicity ratings, even when several other possible contributing factors were partialed out, including log word frequency, concreteness, and word length. The pattern in Spanish held for two collections of iconicity ratings, one with the verbs of the 600-word set presented in infinitive form, and one with the verbs conjugated in the third person singular form. In English, the correlation between age of acquisition and iconicity held when the ratings were collected for words presented in written form only and in written form plus a spoken recording. It also held for ratings based on a more implicit measure of iconicity in which participants rated how accurately a space alien could guess the meaning of the word based on its sound alone. The pattern in English also held when Perry et al. (2015) factored out the systematicity of words [taken from Monaghan et al. (2014)]. Systematicity is measured as a correlation between form similarity and meaning similarity—that is, the degree to which words with similar meanings have similar forms. Monaghan et al. computed systematicity for a large number of English words and found a negative correlation with the age of acquisition of the word from 2 to 13+ years of age—more systematic words are learned earlier. Monaghan et al. (2014) and Christiansen and Chater (2016) observe that consistent sound-meaning patterns may facilitate early vocabulary acquisition, but the child would soon have to master arbitrary relationships necessitated by increases in vocabulary size. In theory, systematicity, sometimes called “relative iconicity,” is independent of iconicity. For example, the English cluster gl– occurs systematically in several words related to “vision” and “light,” such as glitter, glimmer, and glisten (Bergen, 2004), but the segments bear no obvious resemblance to this meaning. Monaghan et al. (2014) question whether spoken languages afford sufficient degrees of articulatory freedom for words to be iconic but not systematic. As evidence, they give the example of onomatopoeic words for the calls of small animals (e.g., peep and cheep) versus calls of big animals (roar and grrr), which would systematically reflect the size of the animal. Although Perry et al. (2015) found a positive effect of iconicity at 30 months, they did not evaluate its influence across the first years of a child’s life. To address this question, we conduct a more detailed examination of the time course of iconicity in word learning across the first 4 years of expressive vocabulary acquisition. In addition, we examine the role of iconicity in the acquisition of receptive vocabulary as well as productive vocabulary. There is some evidence that although receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary are correlated with one another, a variable might not have equivalent influences on these two expressions of vocabulary. Massaro and Rowe (2015), for example, showed that difficulty of articulation had a strong effect on word production but not word comprehension. Thus, it is possible that the influence of iconicity on vocabulary development differs between production and comprehension. In particular, a larger influence on comprehension might follow from the emphasis of the bootstrapping hypothesis on iconicity serving to perceptually cue children to the connection between the sound of a word and its meaning
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机译：先前的研究发现，象似性（即单词形式与含义之间的动机对应关系）有助于表达词汇的习得。我们使用两个不同的数据库以及新颖的分析方法进行了两项新的实验，以详细量化图标性如何在整个开发过程中促进词汇习得，包括接受理解和生产。结果表明，偶像性在习得初期更普遍，并且随着年龄的增长和词汇量的增加而减少。在第一个实验中，我们发现偶像性对儿童生产词汇的影响随着年龄的增长而逐渐减小。这些效果与所观察到的具体性，发音困难和父母输入频率的影响无关。重要的是，我们证实了象似性，具体性和系统性的独立性–声音和含义之间的统计规律性。在第二个实验中，我们发现，随着词汇量的增加，孩子的接受性词汇和表达性词汇的平均象似性显着降低。这些结果表明，标志性单词倾向于在接受性词汇和表达性词汇的获取中早被学习。我们建议将象似性作为对儿童早期词汇习得的许多不同影响之一。面对将一个新词的形式（例如“ gavagai”）与它的特殊含义（例如“兔子”； Quine，1960年，1990/1992年）联系起来的逻辑上不可克服的挑战，孩子们设法轻松地学习单词。对这一过程的兴趣已渗透到发展心理学，心理语言学和语言研究的经验和理论研究中。研究者研究了学习哪些单词以及何时学习这些单词（Fenson等，1994），在单词学习中存在偏见（Markman，1990，1991）。单词的感知，社会和语言特性（Gentner，1982； Waxman，1999； Maguire等，2006； Vosoughi等，2010），所学语言的结构（Gentner和Boroditsky，2001），以及儿童环境对单词学习的影响（Hart和Risley，1995； Roy等，2015）。越来越多的研究还表明，单词的象似性可能是单词学习的重要因素（Imai和Kita，2014； Perniss和Vigliocco，2014； Perry等人，2015）。象似性通常是指信号的形式（例如，口语，符号和书面字符）与其含义之间的对应关系。例如，树的手语在许多手语中都是标志性的：类似于美国手语在地面上挥舞的树枝，丹麦手语中树的轮廓，中国手语中的树干。与手语相反，口头语言通常被认为是任意的，并假设大多数单词的形式与其含义不相似（例如Hockett，1960; Pinker and Bloom，1990）。但是，现在有大量研究表明，在许多口语词典中，象似性普遍存在（Nuckolls，1999； Dingemanse等，2015）。大多数语言都包含声音的标志性单词清单-象拟声词（例如，飞溅，啪声和moo），听起来有点像它们所引用的真实事件的声音。例如，Rhodes（1994）用英语计算了超过100个这些单词。许多语言也包含大量的发音器清单，这是一类独特的标志性单词，用于表达各种丰富的感觉运动意义（Nuckolls，1999； Voeltz和Kilian-Hatz，2001； Dingemanse，2012）。例如，在日语中，单词“ koron”（具有清音[k]指的是轻物体滚动一次，重复的“ korokoro”表示重复的轻物体，而“ gorogoro”-带有语音[g]）到重物反复滚动（今井和北，2014）。而在加纳语中的四吾吾（Siwu）中，发音器包括诸如fwεfwε的“弹性，弹性”和saaa的“清凉感”（Dingemanse等人，2015）。除了拟声词和发音器之外，还有证据表明形容词和动词（也倾向于传达感觉运动图像）也具有相对标志性（Nygaard等，2009； Perry等，2015）。标志性单词的另一个领域涉及单词的发音点与其含义之间的某种对应关系。例如，在鼻子用词中的鼻辅音和嘴唇用词中的双唇辅音的语言似乎普遍存在（Urban，2011）。口语单词也可以在单词的含义和其发音的其他方面之间具有对应关系。单词teeny的含义很小，但其发音声道相对较小，具有高前音元音，其特征是嘴唇缩回和高频第二共振峰（Ohala，1994）。从而，“小”可以看作是“小”的标志性符号（与后背较大的声道结构，巨大的圆形元音相比），这种模式在多种语言的词典中都有记载（Ultan，1978； Blasi等） 。，2016）。 Lewis and Frank（2016）研究了一种更抽象的象似形式，即越有意义的复杂词往往越长。对许多不同语言的评估表明，从概念上讲，较复杂的含义往往具有较长的口头表达形式。在他们的研究中，参与者倾向于将相对较长的新颖单词分配给概念上更复杂的对象。理解较复杂的含义通常由更长的单词表示可以帮助孩子解析口语流，从而促进单词学习。一些发育心理学家认为，象似性通过“引导”或“桥接”符号与其所指对象之间的联系来帮助幼儿学习单词（Imai和Kita，2014； Perniss和Vigliocco，2014）。根据这个想法，孩子们开始借助图标提示来掌握单词学习，这有助于说明单词的形式与其含义之间的联系。动词的学习尤其可以从象似性中受益，因为动词的指称对于幼儿来说更加抽象和具有挑战性（Gentner，1982; Snedeker and Gleitman，2004）。通过帮助孩子们更牢固地理解符号的概念，象似性可以为随后的非图标性单词学习冲刺奠定基础。象似性在单词学习中起作用的假说得到了实验研究的支持，实验研究表明，幼儿在象形时更擅长学习单词（尤其是动词）（Imai等人，2008； Kantartzis等人，2011； Yoshida，2012） ）。例如，在一项研究中，向3岁的日本儿童学习了一套新颖的动作动词。孩子们学到的一些单词是标志性的（“声音符号”），是根据日本模仿者中发现的标志性模式创建的（例如，新颖的单词nosunosu代表慢速行走； Imai等人，2008年）。结果表明，与没有动作的动词相比，当动词成为动作的标志时，儿童能够更好地概括跨动作者的动作词。随后的一项研究也使用了基于日语模仿语的新颖动词，与3岁的说英语的孩子重复了这一发现（Kantartzis等，2011）。然而，仍需确定在标志性条件下训练的孩子是否可以将其学习推广到否则将无法学习的非标志性条件。事实证明，年龄在14个月以下的儿童在字词学习中受益匪浅（Imai等人，2015）。当这些孩子具有标志性时，他们会更好地学习带有尖峰和圆角形状的新颖单词，这与奇奇和布巴音的象征意义相对应（例如，Köhler，1947； Ramachandran和Hubbard，2001）。如果确实容易学习标志性单词，那么在学习自然语言的早期就应该有很多标志性单词。有证据表明，在手语中就是这种情况，手语被普遍认为包含标志性的符号[Klima and Bellugi，1979;例如，在Signing Savvy（2016）中显而易见。尽管标志性在标志性获取中的作用受到争议[例如，Orlansky和Bonvillian，1984；参见Thompson（2011）进行讨论]，迄今为止最彻底的研究发现，儿童较早学习的英国手语（BSL）的符号往往更具标志性（Thompson等，2012）。汤普森（Thompson）等人对标志获取年龄的测量来自MacArthur-Bates交流发展清单（MCDI; Fenson等人，1994）的父母报告，该报告适用于BSL（Woolfe等人，2010） 。标志的象似性是根据BSL签署者的判断从规范中抽取的，比例从1（完全不是标志性）到7（高度标志性；参见Vinson等。 （2008），用于规范细节和BSL视频]。汤普森等。 （2012）发现标志性判断与理解和产生的单词之间存在正相关。即使在控制了可成像性和熟悉性的贡献之后，这种关系仍然存在。然而，令人惊讶的是，年龄较大的儿童（21至30个月大）的相关性明显强于年龄较小的儿童（11至20个月大的年龄）。汤普森等。认为较大的儿童具有象似性的更大作用可能是由于他们认知能力的提高或他们在理解有意义的形式-意义映射上的丰富经验所致。但是，这一建议与象似性在语言使用中应扮演更重要角色的期望并不吻合。因此，尽管在单词学习中支持象似性，但对年长儿童的较大影响与自举假设不一致，其中标志性应在词汇学习中更早地发挥更大的作用（Imai和Kita，2014年； Perniss和Vigliocco，2014年）。在口语中也有证据表明，较早学习的单词往往更具标志性。佩里等。 （2015年）收集了大约600个英语和西班牙语单词的象似性评级，这些单词最早是由儿童从他们各自的MCDI中选出的。 Amazon Mechanical Turk上的母语使用者在-5到5的范围内对单词的象似性进行评分，其中5表示该单词具有极高的图标性，-5表示其含义相反，而0表示其完全任意。 。他们对评分者的指示在附录中给出，因为相同的指示用于获取我们的标志性评分。佩里等。 （2015）的结果显示，即使部分其他可能的影响因素（包括对数词的频率，具体性和易感性）被分拆，英语和西班牙语在30个月时英语和西班牙语儿童词汇中单词的可能性也与正向性等级呈正相关。字长。西班牙语中的模式适用于两种偶像性评级集合，一种具有不定式形式的600词集动词，另一种具有第三人称单数形式的动词共轭。在英语中，当收集仅以书面形式和书面形式以及口头录音形式呈现的单词的评级时，所获得的年龄与标志性之间的相关性得以保持。它还根据一种更隐含的象似性度量来进行评级，其中参与者对空间外星人仅凭其声音就能猜测出该词的含义的准确程度进行了评估。佩里等人（英语：Perry et al。 （2015）排除了单词的系统性[摘自Monaghan等。 （2014）]。系统性被度量为形式相似度和含义相似度之间的相关性，也就是说，具有相似含义的词具有相似形式的程度。 Monaghan等。计算了大量英语单词的系统性，发现与2到13岁以上的单词的获取年龄呈负相关-较系统的单词会更早学习。 Monaghan等。 （2014）和Christiansen and Chater（2016）观察到，一致的声音模式可能有助于早期词汇的习得，但是孩子很快就必须掌握因词汇量增加而必需的任意关系。从理论上讲，系统性（有时称为“相对图标性”）与图标性无关。例如，英语集群gl–系统地出现在与“视觉”和“光”相关的几个词中，例如闪光，微光和闪闪发光（Bergen，2004年），但这些片段与这一含义没有明显的相似之处。 Monaghan等。 （2014年）质疑口语是否提供了足够的发音自由度，使单词具有标志性而不是系统性。作为证据，他们举了象声词的例子，用小动物（例如，窥视和che叫）和大动物（咆哮和咕rr声）来呼唤，这系统地反映了动物的体型。虽然佩里等。 （2015）发现偶像性在30个月时产生了积极影响，他们没有评估其在儿童一生中的影响。为了解决这个问题，我们对表达性词汇习得的头四年中单词学习中象似性的时间过程进行了更详细的研究。此外，我们研究了象似性在接受词汇和生产词汇中的作用。有证据表明，尽管接受性词汇和生产性词汇相互关联，但变量可能对这两种词汇表达没有同等的影响。例如，Massaro和Rowe（2015）指出，发音困难对单词产生有很大影响，但对单词理解没有影响。因此，在生产和理解之间，象似性对词汇发展的影响可能会有所不同。特别地，对理解的更大影响可能来自于对象似性的自举假设的强调，该象似性用于在感知上提示儿童单词的声音与其含义之间的联系。
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