Sign learning of hearing children in inclusive day care centers—does iconicity matter?

Abstract

An increasing number of experimental studies suggest that signs and gestures can scaffold vocabulary learning for children with and without special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND). However, little research has been done on the extent to which iconicity plays a role in sign learning, particularly in inclusive day care centers. This current study investigated the role of iconicity in the sign learning of 145 hearing children (2;1 to 6;3 years) from inclusive day care centers with educators who started using sign-supported speech after a training module. Children’s sign use was assessed via a questionnaire completed by their educators. We found that older children were more likely to learn signs with a higher degree of iconicity, whereas the learning of signs by younger children was less affected by iconicity. Children with SEND did not benefit more from iconicity than children without SEND. These results suggest that whether iconicity plays a role in sign learning depends on the age of the children.

Feeling signs: motor encoding enhances sign language learning in hearing adults

“…Contemporary research with a more nuanced and expansive view of iconicity has refuted the traditional view by providing evidence of iconicity's pervasiveness in both spoken and signed languages from around the world (Dingemanse et al, 2015;Perniss et al, 2010). Consistent with this view, iconicity facilitates the acquisition of L1 signs by deaf children from a variety of languages, including American Sign Language (ASL; Caselli & Pyers, 2017), British Sign Language (BSL; Thompson et al, 2012), Turkish Sign Language (Sümer et al, 2017), Israeli Sign Language (Novogrodsky & Meir, 2020), and the acquisition of L2 signs from German Sign Language by hearing children (Goppelt-Kunkel et al, 2023).…”