Iconicity Supports Young Children’s Production of Complex Sentences

A new LuCiD study sheds light on how young children’s understanding and use of adverbial clauses is influenced by the concept of iconicity—whether the order of information in a sentence mirrors the actual sequence of events. While previous research has shown that iconicity plays a key role in comprehension (De Ruiter et al., 2018), this study explores whether the same principle also applies to children's production of such sentences.

The study, conducted by LuCiD colleagues Shijie Zhang, Silke Brandt, and Anna Theakston, examined sentence production in 106 monolingual English-speaking participants across four age groups: 42 four-year-olds, 42 five-year-olds, 22 eight-year-olds, and 20 adult controls. Using a sentence completion task, the team tested children's production across four types of adverbial connectives: after, before, because, and if.

The results revealed that both four- and five-year-olds were more accurate in producing sentences in iconic order—for example, “She builds a tower, before she breaks her train” or “After she builds a tower, she breaks her train.” This suggests that iconicity serves as a helpful semantic strategy during early language production, even when children face the additional demands of planning and articulation.

Interestingly, the effect of iconicity persisted into later childhood but was more selective. Eight-year-olds showed enhanced accuracy for because- and if-sentences when they were in iconic order. This may be due to the greater semantic and pragmatic complexity of these connectives, which continue to pose challenges even as children’s language abilities develop.

This study provides new evidence that iconicity supports not only the comprehension but also the production of adverbial clauses in early development. It highlights the importance of considering how sentence structure aligns with real-world event sequences in understanding how children acquire complex language forms.