Kirsty Green
Thesis Title: Are early interactions more iconic because they are more engaging?
Iconicity seems especially prevalent in early communication, with one hypothesis being that this is because it scaffolds word learning by helping infants to establish referentiality and another being that the phonological simplicity of iconic words makes them more salient for infants. This study examines whether another function of iconicity could be that it increases infants' engagement in interactions because there is something inherently more fun about iconic communication. Iconicity ratings will be assigned to transcribed words in a number of mothers' utterances in naturalisitic interactions with their infants between the ages of 12 and 24 months from the CHILDES corpus. High and low iconicity bouts will be identified by calculating the rolling average of iconicity per 5 words and focusing on those utterances with the highest and lowest averages. Key features from high and low iconicity bouts will be coded from corresponding video to see whether behaviours indicative of high engagement co-occur with high iconicity interactions. Mother and infant dyads will also be invited to the lab to participate in an experimental study where they will be given a novel object with either an iconic or arbitrary label. Features of their interactions will be coded to see if iconicity affects how engaging the interaction is.
Biography
PhD student (2022-2025) supervised by Professor Sotaro Kita and Dr Marcus Perlman with over 9 years’ previous experience as an outstanding secondary school teacher and middle-leader. A passionate student with exceptional organisational skills, creativity and resilience, my research interests include child language development, language development in individuals with rare genetic syndromes and iconicity in speech and gesture.
Publications
(2022) Iconic words may be common in early child interactions because
they are more engaging Proceedings of the Joint Conference of Language Evolution,
Kanazawa, Japan
Memberships
International Gesture Society; Experimental Psychology Society
Psychology
University of Warwick
2021 Cohort 1+3
www.linkedin.com/in/kirsty-green
Supervisory Team
Sotaro Kita
Marcus Perlman