I've enjoyed the Child Language Symposium at the University of Reading. It was especially fun to present my work on the iconicity advantage for young children learning onomatopoeia as part of our Iconicity Symposium @suzanneaussems.bsky.social@cyberming.bsky.social@cathelaing.bsky.social
I presented my latest work on whether young children benefit from iconicity when learning novel onomatopoeia at the EPS meeting in Lancaster last week (spoiler -they do!) Great conference, lovely people and excellent range of talks.
@thomhills.bsky.social looking chuffed with his baby: Behavioural Network Science: Language, Mind, Society. Go ask your library to stock this masterpiece!
Infants have impressive representational abilities and it is important to consider the interactional context when researching the development of gesture!
Although gestures were sometimes imitated or derived from adult models, most gestures were not. Infants' creativity and innovativeness in producing iconic gestures led us to believe that they may understand the link between the form and meaning of the gestures they produce.
There was mixed evidence for the symbolic distancing hypothesis (that conceptually less-challenging gestures would be produced earlier). Children used more object-in-hand gestures to depict transitive actions but also more imagined object than body-part-as-object gestures.
We identified the first 10 iconic gestures produced by 5 English-speaking infants in a naturalistic video corpus and analysed their form and context. The great majority of gestures depicted actions.
In my paper with @mperlman.bsky.social and Sotaro Kita (published in Gesture last week benjamins.com/catalog/gest...) we show that infants can create their own iconic gestures, producing their first iconic gesture between 12 and 20 months! Gestures varied in level of conceptual difficulty.
My first article has been published online in Gesture today. Take a look if you're interested in iconic gestures and caregiver- infant interactions 😁 www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour...
🎉 Big news! I'm submitting my PhD thesis this September! 📝✨ It's been a wild ride of research, resilience, and way too many snacks to fuel me, and now I’m officially on the hunt for my next adventure. 🚀
