Iconicity can ground the creation of vocal symbols

Perlman, Marcus; Dale, Rick; Lupyan, Gary

doi:10.1098/rsos.150152

Cited by 108 publications

(123 citation statements)

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“…These results contribute to an accumulating collection of studies revealing a significant role of iconicity in language acquisition and in language more broadly, including spoken and signed languages (Nuckolls, 1999;Taub, 2001;Imai and Kita, 2014;Perlman and Cain, 2014;Perniss and Vigliocco, 2014;Dingemanse et al, 2015;Perlman et al, 2015;Perry et al, 2015). In particular, this study provides a detailed quantification of how the iconicity of learned words varies across vocabulary development, and the only one to date including both receptive understanding and production.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Quantifying Iconicity’s Contribution during Language Acquisition: Implications for Vocabulary Learning

Massaro

Perlman

2017

Front. Commun.

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Previous research found that iconicity-the motivated correspondence between word form and meaning-contributes to expressive vocabulary acquisition. We present two new experiments with two different databases and with novel analyses to give a detailed quantification of how iconicity contributes to vocabulary acquisition across development, including both receptive understanding and production. The results demonstrate that iconicity is more prevalent early in acquisition and diminishes with increasing age and with increasing vocabulary. In the first experiment, we found that the influence of iconicity on children's production vocabulary decreased gradually with increasing age. These effects were independent of the observed influence of concreteness, difficulty of articulation, and parental input frequency. Importantly, we substantiated the independence of iconicity, concreteness, and systematicity-a statistical regularity between sounds and meanings. In the second experiment, we found that the average iconicity of both a child's receptive vocabulary and expressive vocabulary diminished dramatically with increases in vocabulary size. These results indicate that iconic words tend to be learned early in the acquisition of both receptive vocabulary and expressive vocabulary. We recommend that iconicity be included as one of the many different influences on a child's early vocabulary acquisition.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Quantifying Iconicity’s Contribution during Language Acquisition: Implications for Vocabulary Learning

Massaro

Perlman

2017

Front. Commun.

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“…Pāṇini's succinct statements on the matter are found in sutra's I.4.62, V.4.57, VI.1.98-100 and VIII.2.4 and revolve around the notion of anukáraṇa, or imitative words (Hoffkann 1952;Pāṇini 1962). Two structural observations are made: these words are marked by the quotative -iti, and they often occur in reduplicated form.…”

Section: The Discovery Of Ideophonesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Redrawing the margins of language: Lessons from research on ideophones

Dingemanse

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

112

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Ideophones (also known as expressives or mimetics, and including onomatopoeia) have been systematically studied in linguistics since the 1850s, when they were first described as a lexical class of vivid sensory words in West-African languages. This paper surveys the research history of ideophones, from its roots in African linguistics to its fruits in general linguistics and typology around the globe. It shows that despite a recurrent narrative of marginalisation, work on ideophones has made an impact in many areas of linguistics, from theories of phonological features to typologies of manner and motion, and from sound symbolism to sensory language. Due to their hybrid nature as gradient vocal gestures that grow roots in discrete linguistic systems, ideophones provide opportunities to reframe typological questions, reconsider the role of language ideology in linguistic scholarship, and rethink the margins of language. With ideophones increasingly being brought into the fold of the language sciences, this review synthesises past theoretical insights and empirical findings in order to enable future work to build on them.

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“…Another theory which also rests on mimesis suggests that symbolic language may originate from iconic vocal signs (or sound symbols) on the assumption that “iconicity seems easier” than making arbitrary associations (Kita, 1997; Monaghan et al, 2012; Thompson et al, 2012; Imai and Kita, 2014; Sereno, 2014; Perlman et al, 2015; Massaro and Perlman, 2017). The idea that symbols arose from a mimicking of objects and events partly draws from experiments by Sapir (1929) and Köhler (1947) on “sound-shape” pairings, where listeners judge perceived consonants and vowels as relating, for instance, to “angular” and “rounded” forms, or Ohala’s (1994) “frequency code” where pitch is related to features like “size” and “brilliance” (e.g., Maurer et al, 2006; the frequency code also extends across species that use vocal pitch in signaling aggressive/passive intentions; Morton, 1994).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Structural Effects of Modality on the Rise of Symbolic Language: A Rebuttal of Evolutionary Accounts and a Laboratory Demonstration

2018

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Why does symbolic communication in humans develop primarily in an oral medium, and how do theories of language origin explain this? Non-human primates, despite their ability to learn and use symbolic signs, do not develop symbols as in oral language. This partly owes to the lack of a direct cortico-motoneuron control of vocalizations in these species compared to humans. Yet such modality-related factors that can impinge on the rise of symbolic language are interpreted differently in two types of evolutionary storylines. (1) Some theories posit that symbolic language originated in a gestural modality, as in “sign languages.” However, this overlooks work on emerging sign and spoken languages showing that gestures and speech shape signs differently. (2) In modality-dependent theories, some emphasize the role of iconic sounds, though these lack the efficiency of arbitrary symbols. Other theorists suggest that ontogenesis serves to identify human-specific mechanisms underlying an evolutionary shift from pitch varying to orally modulated vocalizations (babble). This shift creates numerous oral features that can support efficient symbolic associations. We illustrate this principle using a sound-picture association task with 40 learners who hear words in an unfamiliar language (Mandarin) with and without a filtering of oral features. Symbolic associations arise more rapidly and accurately for sounds containing oral features compared to sounds bearing only pitch features, an effect also reported in experiments with infants. The results imply that, beyond a competence to learn and use symbols, the rise of symbolic language rests on the types of signs that a modality of expression affords.

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Iconicity can ground the creation of vocal symbols

Cited by 108 publications

References 46 publications

Quantifying Iconicity’s Contribution during Language Acquisition: Implications for Vocabulary Learning

Quantifying Iconicity’s Contribution during Language Acquisition: Implications for Vocabulary Learning

Redrawing the margins of language: Lessons from research on ideophones

The Structural Effects of Modality on the Rise of Symbolic Language: A Rebuttal of Evolutionary Accounts and a Laboratory Demonstration

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