Iconicity as a General Property of Language: Evidence from Spoken and Signed Languages
By Pamela Perniss, Robin L. Thompson, Gabriella Vigliocco. Front. Psychology, 2010
541 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Current views about language are dominated by the idea of arbitrary connections between linguistic form and meaning. However, if we look beyond the more familiar Indo-European languages and also include both spoken and signed language modalities, we find that motivated, iconic form-meaning mappings are, in fact, pervasive in language. In this paper, we review the different types of iconic mappings that characterize languages in both modalities, including the predominantly visually iconic mappings found in signed languages. Having shown that iconic mapping are present across languages, we then proceed to review evidence showing that language users (signers and speakers) exploit iconicity in language processing and language acquisition. While not discounting the presence and importance of arbitrariness in language, we put forward the idea that iconicity need also be recognized as a general property of language, which may serve the function of reducing the gap between linguistic form and conceptual representation to allow the language system to “hook up” to motor, perceptual, and affective experience.
Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1996c74a7a4c1e4aa86cd5f8786d16770efb4644
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Developmental and Educational Psychology
- Mark Dingemanse
- Gabriella Vigliocco
- David P. Vinson
- Pamela Perniss
- Asli Ozyurek
- Roel M. Willems
- Mirella Lapata
- Sotaro Kita
In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
- Mark Dingemanse
- Gabriella Vigliocco
- Pamela Perniss
- Christine F. Cuskley
- Asli Ozyurek
- Roel M. Willems
- Sotaro Kita
- Bodo Winter
In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Mappings between linguistic sound and motion (2013, background): “From the linguistic perspective, a growing body of work has emerged describing sound symbolic phenomena in natural language (e.g., Hinton, Nichols, and Ohala, 1994; Voeltz and Killian-Hatz, 2001; Perniss, Thompson, and Vigliocco, 2010).”
- Iconicity as a communicative strategy: Recipient design in multimodal demonstrations for adults and children (2013, background): “The transmission of knowledge, however, is effective only if one chooses the proper recipient design (that is, the ability to shape the intended message taking into account the need of the addressee; i.e., Sacks et al., 1974; Bruner, 1983; Clark, 1996; Galati and Brennan, 2010).”
- Ideophones and gesture in everyday speech (2013, background): “…there is quite some work on depiction in speech (Westermann, 1927; Nuckolls, 1999; Dingemanse, 2011c) as well as on depiction in gesture (Mandel, 1977; Kendon, 2004; Streeck, 2008), there are few occassions where the two have been considered together (but see Perniss et al., 2010; Kendon, 2008).”
- Language as a multimodal phenomenon: implications for language learning, processing and evolution (2014, background): “sub-Saharan African languages, Australian Aboriginal languages, Japanese, Korean, Southeast Asian languages, indigenous languages of South America, and Balto-Finnic languages; see [19] for references).”