‘Sticky’ speech, other evocative words may improve language

During a study at the University of Miami, an associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Psychology had previously found that children tend to learn words higher in iconicity earlier in development then they do words lower in iconicity.

Some words sound like what they mean. For example, “slurp” sounds like the noise we make when we drink from a cup, and “teeny” sounds like something that is very small. This resemblance between how a word sounds and what it means is known as iconicity.

Associate Professor Lynn Perry also found that adults tend to use more iconic words when they speak to children than when they speak to other adults. “That got us curious about why,” said Stephanie Custode, a doctoral student in psychology, who worked with Perry to answer questions posed by her prior work. The researchers explored whether parents’ who used iconic words as they played with novel objects with children between 1 and 2 helped them learn those objects’ names. The objects were novel toys and foods that the researchers made and gave names to, like the word “blicket” to describe a clay toy with a made-up shape. They found that when parents named a novel object, their children were more likely to remember those novel names later if the parent also used highly iconic words in the same sentence. –ANI

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Dr. Singh further added, “You see masks are like condoms until you know how to wear them correctly and yes, they are not 100 per cent safe. Hence be very

the maximum virus of other people. Close contact with a mask on could be risky. Hence, I would advise avoiding face-to-face contact or closeness.”

What kind of problem arises if two masked people kiss each other? She answers, “It is still a questionable thing, your protective layer over your nose might not be good enough, because the virus is readily transmitted by aerosols. One should be very careful and avoid kissing even with a mask on in public”.