Iconicity facilitates learning signs, but it is unknown whether recognition of meaning from the sign form occurs automatically. We recorded ERPs to highly iconic (transparent) and non-iconic ASL signs presented to one group who knew they would be taught signs (learners) and another group with no such expectations (non-learners). Participants watched sign videos and detected an occasional grooming gesture (no semantic processing required). Before sign onset, learners showed a greater frontal negativity compared to non-learners for both sign types, possibly due to greater motivation to attend to signs. During the N400 window, learners showed greater negativity to iconic than non-iconic signs, indicating more semantic processing for iconic signs. The non-learners showed a later and much weaker iconicity effect. The groups did not differ in task performance or in P3 amplitude. We conclude that comprehending the form-meaning mapping of highly iconic signs is not automatic and requires motivation and attention.

This work focuses on a pattern of tonal alternation that is intertwined with a pattern of reduplication in Nigerian Pidgin. In the language, verbs are reduplicated to iconically express iteration. To convey that the iterated event occurs in an irregular or dispersive manner, the verb bears a low tone (L) on all its tone-bearing units (TBU), while the reduplicant bears a high tone (H) on all its TBUs. The resulting L-H tonal melody is considered the exponent of an irregular marker, while the intertwined reduplication is considered the exponent of an iteration marker. Due to the similarity between the exponent of the irregular marker and the iconic tonal melody of ideophones that express the semantic notions of irregularity across languages, the form-meaning mapping of the irregular marker is regarded as a grammaticalised form of the tone melody in the substrate ideophones. This suggests that ideophones can contribute to the emergence and expansion of grammar, as well as the typology of grammatical tone. Considering that perceptual resemblance between linguistic structures and the structural components of real-world elements is the basis of iconicity, the pattern of tonal alternation in Nigerian Pidgin suggests that the notion of perceptual motivation in linguistic theory is not purely phonetic and phonological but also includes the crossmodal perception of sensory imagery.

Japanese patients often describe their pain with ideophones (sound-symbolic, imitative words), such as biribiri ‘having a continuous electric shock’. However, some manuals for healthcare workers recommend avoiding using these words in their interactions with patients, assuming that they are too subjective. We examined how reliable pain ideophones are in comparison with pain metaphors, such as denki-ga hashiru-yoona itami ‘pain like an electric current running through one’s body’. In Experiment 1, Japanese speakers rated visually presented pain ideophones and metaphors on 15 semantic-differential scales (e.g., strong–weak, momentary–continuous). It was found that the ratings of ideophones and metaphors equally varied between participants. In Experiment 2, Japanese speakers did the same rating task for a selected set of pain ideophones and metaphors presented auditorily in sentence frames. The results show that ideophones were rated more consistently than metaphors across participants, and this was true for various prosodic/morphological variants of ideophones (e.g., biriiit-to ‘having a sudden, great electric shock’, biribirit-to ‘having a momentary repetitive electric shock’). These findings indicate that ideophones can be more reliable than metaphors in health communication, especially when placed in proper context.

Children up to school age are known to have difficulty comprehending complex sentences with temporal connectives, but the reasons remain controversial. We tested six- to twelve-year-old children to assess how the iconicity of event-language mapping, type of connective, and clause order mediate the comprehension of temporal sentences. Sixty monolingual Greek-speaking children and 15 adult controls completed a picture-sequence selection task in which they judged after- and before-sentences in iconic and non-iconic order. Up to age twelve, children did not reach full adult-like comprehension of the connectives; performance in non-iconic after-sentences was significantly lower than in the other three conditions across all ages. We conclude that neither iconicity, connective, nor clause order can fully explain these findings and propose an account based on the interaction of iconicity and clause order: non-iconic, sentence-medial after requires revision of the initial event representation, resulting in an event-semantic kindergarten-path that children find difficult to overcome.

Post-cessation nationhood in South Sudan presented a paradoxical situation: a country united during struggle is fragmented after independence. Among the triggers for this scenario was the death of Dr John Garang de Mabior—the country’s founding father. This article is a multidisciplinary semiotic critique of Akuol de Mabior’s film, No Simple Way Home (2023), against the history of South Sudanese nationhood. Without claiming a political scientific analysis, the author proposes that South Sudan’s crisis of nationhood is symptomatic of a quest for a unifying icon. He theorizes the protagonist’s quintessence of motherhood as a semiotic gesture of her de jure iconicity of unified nationhood.

A well-known method of studying iconic words is through the collection of subjective ratings. We collected such ratings regarding familiarity, iconicity, imagery/imageability, concreteness, sensory experience rating (SER), valence and arousal for Mandarin ABB words. This is a type of phrasal compound consisting of a prosaic syllable A and a reduplicated BB part, resulting in a vivid phrasal compound, for example, wù-mángmáng 雾茫茫 ‘completely foggy’. The correlations between the newly collected ABB ratings are contrasted with two other sets of prosaic word ratings, demonstrating that variables that characterize ABB words in an absolute sense may not play a distinctive role when contrasted with other types of words. Next, we provide another angle for looking at ABB words, by investigating to what degree rating data converges with corpus data. By far, the variable that characterizes ABB items consistently throughout these case studies is their high score for imageability, showing that they are indeed rightfully characterized as vivid. Methodologically, we show that it pays off to not take rating data at face value but to contrast it with other comparable datasets of a different phenomenon or data about the same phenomenon compiled in an ontologically different manner.

The literature on face emojis raises the central question whether they should be treated as pictures or conventionalized signals. Our experiment addresses this question by investigating semantic differences in visually similar face emojis. We test a prediction following from a pictorial approach: small visual features of emojis that do not correspond to human facial features should be semantically less relevant than features that represent aspects of facial expressions. We compare emoji pairs with a visual difference that either does or does not correspond to a difference in a human facial expression according to an adaptation of the Facial Action Coding System. We created two contexts per pair, each fitted to correspond to a prominent meaning of one or the other emoji. Participants had to choose a suitable emoji for each context. The rate at which the context-matching emoji was chosen was significantly above chance for both types of emoji pairs and it did not differ significantly between them. Our results show that the small differences are meaningful in all pairs whether or not they correspond to human facial differences. This supports a lexicalist approach to emoji semantics, which treats face emojis as conventionalized signals rather than mere pictures of faces.

While iconicity has sometimes been defined as meaning transparency, it is better defined as a subjective phenomenon bound to an individual’s perception and influenced by their previous language experience. In this article, I investigate the subjective nature of iconicity through an experiment in which 72 deaf, hard-of-hearing and hearing (signing and non-signing) participants rate the iconicity of individual letters of the American Sign Language (ASL) and Swedish Sign Language (STS) manual alphabets. It is shown that L1 signers of ASL and STS rate their own (L1) manual alphabet as more iconic than the foreign one. Hearing L2 signers of ASL and STS exhibit the same pattern as L1 signers, showing an iconic preference for their own (L2) manual alphabet. In comparison, hearing non-signers show no general iconic preference for either manual alphabet. Across all groups, some letters are consistently rated as more iconic in one sign language than the other, illustrating general iconic preferences. Overall, the results align with earlier findings from sign language linguistics that point to language experience affecting iconicity ratings and that one’s own signs are rated as more iconic than foreign signs with the same meaning, even if similar iconic mappings are used.

Little is known about the neural changes that accompany sign language learning by hearing adults. We used ERPs and a word-sign matching task to assess how learning impacted the N400 priming effect (reduced negativity for translations compared to unrelated trials). English monolinguals (N = 32) learned 100 ASL signs – half highly iconic (meaning was guessable), half non-iconic. In contrast to non-iconic signs, little learning was needed for the highly iconic signs as translation accuracy was similar pre- and post-learning. Prior to learning, an N400 priming effect was observed only for iconic signs. After learning, the size of the priming effect increased for non-iconic signs (replicating word learning studies) but decreased for iconic signs. For deaf ASL signers (N = 20), iconicity did not modulate the size of the N400 priming effect. We conclude that the impact of iconicity on lexico-semantic processing is reduced following learning, as signs are integrated into an emerging visual-manual lexicon.

The mental lexicon offers a window into the configuration of conceptual domains such as space and time, which has been labeled as concrete the former and abstract the latter in the current embodiment approach to cognition. Space has a phonological and semantic value in sign languages, but not in spoken languages. Additionally, the representation of time by spatial means is robust in oral and sign languages. This research asks if Deaf signers and hearing nonsigners have the same conceptual organization of those domains. In their respective languages, sixty-two participants made a repeated free word association task. These results showed that the studied populations have a little overlap in the associates evocated for each clue. The analysis of the preferences of the semantic relations of the pairs clue-associate showed a greater tendency of the Deaf signers to establish thematic relations. In contrast, the hearing participants indicated a bias toward taxonomic relations. The results suggest that the abstractness or concreteness of concepts may be modulated by factors associated with linguistic modalities. However, in this compared free association norms factors related to the language deprivation of Deaf, the asymmetries in the cross-modal language contact and cross-modal borrowing were not exhaustively controlled.