Iconicity and Age Make Distinct Contributions to Symbolic Correspondence in Early Childhood

Abstract

Iconicity has been proposed to support children’s symbolic understanding, yet it remains unclear when iconicity contributes to symbolic correspondence and how this contribution varies across early childhood. The present study examined semantic judgments in 204 Chinese preschool children (Mage = 5.36 years, SD = 0.78; 102 boys) across three representational formats: line drawings, Oracle Bone script, and simplified Chinese characters. Children judged whether sequentially presented picture–symbol pairs referred to the same objects or actions, allowing broad format differences to be distinguished from graded item-level iconicity within each format. Children were consistently more accurate when rejecting mismatches than when confirming matches. Iconicity was especially informative when children had to confirm that different forms shared a meaning. Diffusion decision modeling further showed that this advantage was expressed in the accumulation of decision-relevant evidence during confirmation. Older age was associated with more efficient evidence accumulation for establishing semantic correspondence across representational formats, but age did not systematically strengthen or weaken the iconicity-drift relation. These findings suggest that iconicity and age make distinct contributions to symbolic correspondence: iconicity functions as a task-dependent source of information, whereas age-related differences are characterized by broader gains in the efficiency of establishing correspondence across symbolic forms.