Which words are most iconic?

Abstract

Some spoken words are iconic, exhibiting a resemblance between form and meaning. We used native speaker ratings to assess the iconicity of 3001 English words, analyzing their iconicity in relation to part-of-speech differences and differences between the sensory domain they relate to (sight, sound, touch, taste and smell). First, we replicated previous findings showing that onomatopoeia and interjections were highest in iconicity, followed by verbs and adjectives, and then nouns and grammatical words. We further show that words with meanings related to the senses are more iconic than words with abstract meanings. Moreover, iconicity is not distributed equally across sensory modalities: Auditory and tactile words tend to be more iconic than words denoting concepts related to taste, smell and sight. Last, we examined the relationship between iconicity (resemblance between form and meaning) and systematicity (statistical regularity between form and meaning). We find that iconicity in English words is more strongly related to sensory meanings than systematicity. Altogether, our results shed light on the extent and distribution of iconicity in modern English.

Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association

“…Many words had an average rating significantly greater than zero, indicating that this sample of words was not entirely arbitrary. Moreover, the iconicity of words in this sample is related to age of acquisition (Perry et al, 2015), frequency, sensory experience (Winter et al, 2017), and semantic neighborhood density . Thus, instead of being a linguistic curiosity, iconicity appears to be a general property of language that behaves in a predictable manner, even in a less obviously iconic language such as English.…”

“…This is illustrative of the point to follow, that most words contain a combination of arbitrary, systematic, and iconic elements. We chose fun because of its low iconicity rating (Winter, Perry, Perlman, & Lupyan, 2017) and derived systematicity value (Monaghan, Shillcock, Christiansen, & Kirby, 2014). Its length is also atypical of abstract nouns, which tend to be longer than concrete ones (Reilly & Kean, 2007), though this raises the interesting question of whether antisystematic words are arbitrary.…”

“…Taking an even broader view of language, Perry et al (2015) and Winter et al (2017) conducted large-scale norming studies in which 3,001 English words were rated on a scale with 0 indicating arbitrariness and 5 indicating iconicity. Many words had an average rating significantly greater than zero, indicating that this sample of words was not entirely arbitrary.…”

The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms: multidimensional measures of perceptual and action strength for 40,000 English words

“…Perceptual strength norms (also termed modality exclusivity norms, after the original Lynott & Connell, 2009, work) now exist in several different languages, including Russian (Miklashevsky, 2018), Serbian (Filipović Đurđević, Popović Stijačić, & Karapandžić, 2016, Dutch (Speed & Majid, 2017), and Mandarin (Chen, Zhao, Long, Lu, & Huang, 2019), and have been developed for concept-property pairs as well as individual words (van Dantzig, Cowell, Zeelenberg, & Pecher, 2011). The original English-language norms have also been applied in novel ways, such as examining stylistic differences of authors (Kernot, Bossomaier, & Bradbury, 2019), studying perceptual metaphors (e.g., rough sound, smooth melody; Winter, 2019), testing models of lexical representations (Johns & Jones, 2012), evaluating the iconicity of words in written (Winter, Perlman, Perry, & Lupyan, 2017), and signed languages (Perlman, Little, Thompson, & Thompson, 2018), and discovering links between sensory and emotional experience (Winter, 2016).…”

Redrawing the margins of language: Lessons from research on ideophones

“…(Assaneo, Nichols & Trevisan 2011;Dingemanse 2014;Perlman, Dale & Lupyan 2015) • Which words are most iconic, and why? (Winter et al 2017) • How universal or language-specific are iconic form-meaning mappings? (Dingemanse 2012;Occhino et al 2017) Dingemanse: Redrawing the margins of language Art.…”