The bridge of iconicity: from a world of experience to the experience of language

Abstract

Iconicity, a resemblance between properties of linguistic form (both in spoken and signed languages) and meaning, has traditionally been considered to be a marginal, irrelevant phenomenon for our understanding of language processing, development and evolution. Rather, the arbitrary and symbolic nature of language has long been taken as a design feature of the human linguistic system. In this paper, we propose an alternative framework in which iconicity in face-to-face communication (spoken and signed) is a powerful vehicle for bridging between language and human sensori-motor experience, and, as such, iconicity provides a key to understanding language evolution, development and processing. In language evolution, iconicity might have played a key role in establishing displacement (the ability of language to refer beyond what is immediately present), which is core to what language does; in ontogenesis, iconicity might play a critical role in supporting referentiality (learning to map linguistic labels to objects, events, etc., in the world), which is core to vocabulary development. Finally, in language processing, iconicity could provide a mechanism to account for how language comes to be embodied (grounded in our sensory and motor systems), which is core to meaningful communication.

Keywords: co-speech gesture; iconicity; language development; language evolution; language processing; sign language.

Figure 1.

Examples of iconicity in co-speech gesture (gestures accompanying German speech, holding pan (a) and entity rotating (b)) and in sign language (signs from BSL, PUSH (c) and TREE (d)).

Figure 2.

Iconic signs in BSL exhibiting motor iconicity, as in (a) the sign HAMMER, depicting the manual manipulation of a hammer; exhibiting perceptual iconicity, as in (b) the sign DEER, depicting the shape of a deer's antlers; or exhibiting both motor and perceptual iconicity, as in (c) the sign BOTTLE, where the rounded handshape is depictive of the handling of a bottle and the upward tracing movement depicts the cylindrical shape of a bottle.

Figure 3.

Comparison of ratings of iconic signs in BSL according to overall iconicity of the sign (top) and degree of abstraction or schematization of iconic mapping in the sign (bottom).

Figure 4.

Proportion of BSL signs (a) comprehended and (b) produced by children in younger (11–20 months) and older (21–30 months) age groups as a function of sign iconicity, as rated on a scale from 1 = not at all iconic to 7 = highly iconic. (Reprinted from [15] with permission.)

Figure 5.

Examples of iconic modification in BSL, showing manual modification in (a), where the action affordance of a hammer is exaggerated in the sign HAMMER, and showing modification on the face/mouth in (b), where the vibrating lips reflect the spinning motion of tires.