A Complete Real-World Theory of Language Should Explain How Iconicity Remains a Stable Property of Linguistic Systems

Murgiano et al. make a compelling case for studying iconicity in multimodal face-to-face interaction, but they appear ambivalent about the importance of iconicity at the level of the linguistic system. We argue that, rather than decreasing over time, iconicity is a stable property of languages. Understanding how and why this is so is critical to building a complete real-world theory of language that bridges the situated context of language use with language as an evolving symbolic system. An important point for future research is to examine the interface between iconic prosody and the latent iconic features of words and signs that are frozen in the linguistic system

Iconicity in English and Spanish and its relation to lexical category and age of acquisition

Signed languages exhibit iconicity (resemblance between form and meaning) across their vocabulary, and many non-Indo-European spoken languages feature sizable classes of iconic words known as ideophones. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English and Spanish are believed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic words. In three experiments with English and two with Spanish, we asked native speakers to rate the iconicity of ~600 words from the English and Spanish MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories. We found that iconicity in the words of both languages varied in a theoretically meaningful way with lexical category. In both languages, adjectives were rated as more iconic than nouns and function words, and corresponding to typological differences between English and Spanish in verb semantics, English verbs were rated as relatively iconic compared to Spanish verbs. We also found that both languages exhibited a negative relationship between iconicity ratings and age of acquisition. Words learned earlier tended to be more iconic, suggesting that iconicity in early vocabulary may aid word learning. Altogether these findings show that iconicity is a graded quality that pervades vocabularies of even the most “arbitrary” spoken languages. The findings provide compelling evidence that iconicity is an important property of all languages, signed and spoken, including Indo-European languages

The Human-Fostered Gorilla Koko Shows Breath Control in Play with Wind Instruments

Breath control is critical to the production of spoken language and commonly postulated as a unique human adaptation specifically for this function. In contrast, non-human primates are often assumed to lack volitional control over their vocalizations, and implicitly, their breath. This paper takes an embodied perspective on the development of breath control in a human-fostered gorilla, examining her sound play with musical wind instruments. The subject Koko was video recorded in her play with plastic recorders, harmonicas and whistles. The results show that Koko exercises volitional control over her breath during instrument play. More generally, the findings suggest that all great apes share the potential to develop breath control, and that the original adaptive value of breath control was its flexible development for the service of behaviors that happened to be useful within particular sociocultural and physical environments

Iconicity in signed and spoken vocabulary: A comparison between American Sign Language, British Sign Language, English, and Spanish

© 2018 Perlman, Little, Thompson and Thompson. Considerable evidence now shows that all languages, signed and spoken, exhibit a significant amount of iconicity. We examined how the visual-gestural modality of signed languages facilitates iconicity for different kinds of lexical meanings compared to the auditory-vocal modality of spoken languages. We used iconicity ratings of hundreds of signs and words to compare iconicity across the vocabularies of two signed languages - American Sign Language and British Sign Language, and two spoken languages - English and Spanish. We examined (1) the correlation in iconicity ratings between the languages; (2) the relationship between iconicity and an array of semantic variables (ratings of concreteness, sensory experience, imageability, perceptual strength of vision, audition, touch, smell and taste); (3) how iconicity varies between broad lexical classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, grammatical words and adverbs); and (4) between more specific semantic categories (e.g., manual actions, clothes, colors). The results show several notable patterns that characterize how iconicity is spread across the four vocabularies. There were significant correlations in the iconicity ratings between the four languages, including English with ASL, BSL, and Spanish. The highest correlation was between ASL and BSL, suggesting iconicity may be more transparent in signs than words. In each language, iconicity was distributed according to the semantic variables in ways that reflect the semiotic affordances of the modality (e.g., more concrete meanings more iconic in signs, not words; more auditory meanings more iconic in words, not signs; more tactile meanings more iconic in both signs and words). Analysis of the 220 meanings with ratings in all four languages further showed characteristic patterns of iconicity across broad and specific semantic domains, including those that distinguished between signed and spoken languages (e.g., verbs more iconic in ASL, BSL, and English, but not Spanish; manual actions especially iconic in ASL and BSL; adjectives more iconic in English and Spanish; color words especially low in iconicity in ASL and BSL). These findings provide the first quantitative account of how iconicity is spread across the lexicons of signed languages in comparison to spoken languages

People Can Create Iconic Vocalizations to Communicate Various Meanings to Naïve Listeners

Abstract The innovation of iconic gestures is essential to establishing the vocabularies of signed languages, but might iconicity also play a role in the origin of spoken words? Can people create novel vocalizations that are comprehensible to naïve listeners without prior convention? We launched a contest in which participants submitted non-linguistic vocalizations for 30 meanings spanning actions, humans, animals, inanimate objects, properties, quantifiers and demonstratives. The winner was determined by the ability of naïve listeners to infer the meanings of the vocalizations. We report a series of experiments and analyses that evaluated the vocalizations for: (1) comprehensibility to naïve listeners; (2) the degree to which they were iconic; (3) agreement between producers and listeners in iconicity; and (4) whether iconicity helps listeners learn the vocalizations as category labels. The results show contestants were able to create successful iconic vocalizations for most of the meanings, which were largely comprehensible to naïve listeners, and easier to learn as category labels. These findings demonstrate how iconic vocalizations can enable interlocutors to establish understanding in the absence of conventions. They suggest that, prior to the advent of full-blown spoken languages, people could have used iconic vocalizations to ground a spoken vocabulary with considerable semantic breadth

Great apes reach momentary altered mental states by spinning.

Among animals, humans stand out in their consummate propensity to self-induce altered states of mind. Archaeology, history and ethnography show these activities have taken place since the beginnings of civilization, yet their role in the emergence and evolution of the human mind itself remains debatable. The means through which modern humans actively alter their experience of self and reality frequently depend on psychoactive substances, but it is uncertain whether psychedelics or other drugs were part of the ecology or culture of pre-human ancestors. Moreover, (nonhuman) great apes in captivity are currently being retired from medical research, rendering comparative approaches thus far impracticable. Here, we circumvent this limitation by harnessing the breadth of publicly available YouTube data to show that apes engage in rope spinning during solitary play. When spinning, the apes achieved speeds sufficient to alter self-perception and situational awareness that were comparable to those tapped for transcendent experiences in humans (e.g. Sufi whirling), and the number of revolutions spun predicted behavioural evidence for dizziness. Thus, spinning serves as a self-sufficient means of changing body-mind responsiveness in hominids. A proclivity for such experiences is shared between humans and great apes, and provides an entry point for the comparative study of the mechanisms, functions, and adaptive value of altered states of mind in human evolution. [Abstract copyright: © 2023. The Author(s).