Language development beyond the here-and-now: iconicity and displacement in child-directed communication

Most language use is displaced, referring to past, future or hypothetical events. Displacement poses an important challenge for language learning. How can children learn what words refer to when the referent is not physically available? We suggest that caregivers provide children with iconic vocal and gestural cues that imagistically evoke properties of absent referents to support displaced learning. We collected an audio-visual corpus of English-speaking caregiver-child interactions (N = 71, 24-58 months, 37 female) and annotated the range of vocal and manual behaviours caregivers produced. We found that caregivers used iconic cues especially in displaced contexts, using other cues when objects were present. Thus, we map caregivers’ non-linguistic behaviours, showing that they provide iconic cues to support displaced language learning and processing.