Schedule StuTS 65

Understanding how children acquire language remains one of the great challenges of research in the language sciences. Much of the work that explores how children learn to map words to objects and events in the world has been underpinned by two fundamental assumptions: that label and referent are linked by arbitrary convention alone and that learning occurs in situated contexts, where label and referent co-occur. However, in addition to being indisputably arbitrary, language also exploits iconicity, resemblance relationships between form and meaning, e.g. meow, crash. Recent research has shown that iconicity is prevalent in children’s early vocabulary (Laing 2014; Thompson et al. 2012) and that iconicity may bootstrap word acquisition (Imai & Kita 2014; Kantartzis et al. 2011). Furthermore, displacement, the ability to talk about things that are spatially and temporally removed, is an important hallmark of language, and offers learning opportunities (Tomasello & Barton 1994; Tomasello et al. 1996). In this talk, I take a multimodal approach to word learning from the perspective of the amount and type of iconicity that children receive in the input. The focus is on the use of iconicity in child-directed language across modalities, signed and spoken, and across vocal and visual channels, including phonology, gesture and hand actions. I discuss evidence that caregivers exploit iconicity to highlight salient properties of referents and that their use of iconic forms is modulated depending on whether referents being talked about are present in the environment or not (i.e. in situated or displaced contexts) and whether they are familiar or not to the child.

Prof. Dr. Pamela Perniss is a professor for German Sign Language Interpreting at the University of Cologne since February 2019. She has been interested in sign language since her MA in Linguistics, which she finished with a thesis on “Number and Quantification in German Sign Language” at the University of Cologne. She received her PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands with a dissertation on “Space and Iconicity in German Sign language (DGS)” in 2007. She has since worked in Nijmegen, at the Deafness, Cognition, and Language (DCAL) Research Centre at UCL, London, and at the University of Brighton, always following her interest in the role of the visual modality and iconicity in shaping language structure and processing in spoken and signed language.

Info

Day: 2019-05-25
Start time: 10:00
Duration: 01:00
Room: 100 / Hörsaal XIII
Track: Neuro and Psycholinguistics
Language: en

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