Construals of iconicity: experimental approaches to form–meaning resemblances in language

Dingemanse, Mark; Perlman, Marcus; Perniss, Pamela M.

doi:10.1017/langcog.2019.48

Cited by 88 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 58 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…However, these speculations require more systematic testing in future studies. On the whole, the fact that different effects were found for different types of iconicity in the present study provides support for the proposal that there are meaningful distinctions between different types of iconicity (Dingemanse et al, 2020).…”

Section: The Role Of Phonology In Iconicity Effects 35supporting

confidence: 84%

“…A recent review of the literature suggested three ways in which iconicity can be construed: as a discrete property that is absent or present, as a type of relationship between form and meaning that can come in different kinds, and as a gradient that comes in degrees (Dingemanse, Perlman, & Perniss, 2020). To further investigate the iconicity effect, we adopted the latter two approaches.…”

Section: Construals Of Iconicitymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The Role of Phonology in Iconicity Effects: Evidence from Individual Differences

Cnudde¹,

Sidhu²,

Pm³

2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Growing evidence suggests that, along with arbitrariness, non-arbitrariness exists in language. An example of this is iconicity, in which a word’s form resembles its meaning. We investigated whether phonological processing plays a key role in the facilitated processing of iconic language (i.e., in some studies the meanings of iconic words are retrieved more quickly and more accurately). First, we reanalyzed the phonological lexical decision task (PLDT) data from Experiment 2 in Sidhu, Vigliocco, and Pexman (2020), and used accuracy on pseudohomophone trials to gauge extent of phonological processing. Participants with greater pseudohomophone accuracy were found to show larger iconic facilitation. We further tested this relationship with a new PLDT experiment, and collected imitativeness ratings for 522 words in order to manipulate the imitativeness of the iconic stimuli used. We found again that individual differences in phonological processing interacted with iconic facilitation. Further, these effects were found only for imitative iconic words (i.e., onomatopoeia and ideophones), suggesting that direct imitativeness is important to iconic facilitation. These findings suggest phonology plays a key role in iconic facilitation, and that the extent to which an individual engages in phonological processing may affect the strength of observed iconicity effects.

show abstract

Section: The Role Of Phonology In Iconicity Effects 35supporting

confidence: 84%

Section: Construals Of Iconicitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Phonology in Iconicity Effects: Evidence from Individual Differences

Cnudde¹,

Sidhu²,

Pm³

2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Furthermore, iconicity is not a simple property, but comes in different kinds and degrees [34,35]. For example, signs can be more or less iconic, i.e.…”

Section: (I) Motivated Signsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pantomimic fossils in modern human communication

Żywiczyński

Wacewicz

Lister

2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Bodily mimesis, the capacity to use the body representationally, was one of the key innovations that allowed early humans to go beyond the ‘baseline’ of generalized ape communication and cognition. We argue that the original human-specific communication afforded by bodily mimesis was based on signs that involve three entities: an expression that represents an object (i.e. communicated content) for an interpreter . We further propose that the core component of this communication, pantomime, was able to transmit referential information that was not limited to select semantic domains or the ‘here-and-now’, by means of motivated—most importantly iconic—signs. Pressures for expressivity and economy then led to conventionalization of signs and a growth of linguistic characteristics: semiotic systematicity and combinatorial expression. Despite these developments, both naturalistic and experimental data suggest that the system of pantomime did not disappear and is actively used by modern humans. Its contemporary manifestations, or pantomimic fossils , emerge when language cannot be used, for instance when people do not share a common language, or in situations where the use of (spoken) language is difficult, impossible or forbidden. Under such circumstances, people bootstrap communication by means of pantomime and, when these circumstances persist, newly emergent pantomimic communication becomes increasingly language-like. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.

show abstract

“…A recent approach to the systematic study of iconicity across the lexicons of different languages is to interrogate iconicity ratings in which participants data driven iconicity in asl and english assess the degree of resemblance between the form of a sign or word and its meaning. This method operationalizes iconicity as a substance that comes in degrees (Dingemanse, Perlman, & Perniss, 2020), and in doing so, abstracts away from the particular type of iconic mapping at play. Such aggregation of ratings obscures variability in individuals' subjective assessments of formmeaning pairings, but the advantage of this approach is that it enables analysis of hundreds or thousands of items, allowing systematic study of large swaths of a lexicon (see Winter, 2019).…”

Section: Iconic Affordances Of the Articulatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A data-driven approach to the semantics of iconicity in American Sign Language and English

et al. 2020

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A growing body of research shows that both signed and spoken languages display regular patterns of iconicity in their vocabularies. We compared iconicity in the lexicons of American Sign Language (ASL) and English by combining previously collected ratings of ASL signs (Caselli, Sevcikova Sehyr, Cohen-Goldberg, & Emmorey, 2017) and English words (Winter, Perlman, Perry, & Lupyan, 2017) with the use of data-driven semantic vectors derived from English. Our analyses show that models of spoken language lexical semantics drawn from large text corpora can be useful for predicting the iconicity of signs as well as words. Compared to English, ASL has a greater number of regions of semantic space with concentrations of highly iconic vocabulary. There was an overall negative relationship between semantic density and the iconicity of both English words and ASL signs. This negative relationship disappeared for highly iconic signs, suggesting that iconic forms may be more easily discriminable in ASL than in English. Our findings contribute to an increasingly detailed picture of how iconicity is distributed across different languages.

show abstract

Construals of iconicity: experimental approaches to form–meaning resemblances in language

Cited by 88 publications

References 58 publications

The Role of Phonology in Iconicity Effects: Evidence from Individual Differences

The Role of Phonology in Iconicity Effects: Evidence from Individual Differences

Pantomimic fossils in modern human communication

A data-driven approach to the semantics of iconicity in American Sign Language and English

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About