A Case for Indexical/Iconic Linguistic Signs!

I remember the time when one of my kindergarten students was reading aloud the story of Little Red Riding Hood. She read the following lines, "Oh Grandmother," said Little Red Riding Hood, "what big ears you have!" "The better to hear you with, my dear," said the wolf.  "Oh Grandmother, what big eyes you have!" said Red Riding Hood. "The better to see you with , my dear," said the wolf. " "Oh Grandmother, what big teeth you have!" said Red Riding Hood. "The better to EAT you with!" snapped the wolf...."


Five-year-old Natalie read all of these lines fluently, in an even voice, raising it slightly and quite appropriately at the exclamation marks.


But when she came to the word "EAT" in large, big case letters, she made her voice substantially louder. She had obviously responded to the visual stimulus of the big size of the letters, and correctly interpreted their size to represent the big, loud and scary voice of the wolf dressed as her grandmother in the story. Natalie had used this change of voice spontaneously, without any instruction or modeled reading from myself, since I had never read this particular version of the story to her.


Linguistic signs or morphemes are symbolic in nature. They are not indexical or iconic. That is as it should be. For if they were indexical/iconic then the number name "one" would not be the same length as the number name "two", and the word "big" would always be written as BIG, and the word "small" as small. And this would be maddening and quite impossible for how would the word "invisible" or "would' or "shall" be represented for instance? And so there is a very strong case for symbolically represented linguistic signs!


But equally, there is a case to be made for using indexical/iconic representation for certain words in children's literature. Going by Natalie's spontaneous voice amplification in reading the word "EAT", indexical/iconic representation is obviously effective in aiding fluent, expressive reading and comprehension.


Authors of children's books and especially of books for beginning readers would do well to keep this in mind and use the strategy of representing certain words indexically or iconically wherever possible, like when beginning a story with "A loooooong, loooooooong  time ago, ....................."!