Iconic Meanings Are Learned Earlier: Homophones Provide Insight on Iconicity's Role in the Acquisition of Words
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Iconic words are those whose sounds share properties in common with their referents, such as “clatter” or “hiccup.” Research shows that children learn iconic words earlier than arbitrary words and that iconicity may help children form these connections. However, another factor to consider is that iconic words have forms that are easier to produce. To gain further insight into the link between iconicity and acquisition we studied homophones. This allowed us to hold the form of each word constant and examine whether iconic meanings are acquired earlier. Participants provided iconicity ratings on 1668 total meanings for 390 word forms. We ran a mixed effects linear regression and found an effect of iconicity on test-based age-of-acquisition, controlling for word form, length, frequency, phonological neighbourhood, and meaning-specific familiarity. These findings suggest that children learn iconic meanings earlier than arbitrary ones and support iconicity as an important factor in word-learning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".