ArticleScientific reports2018
People Can Create Iconic Vocalizations to Communicate Various Meanings to Naïve Listeners.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Self-reported expressibility predicts communicative success: Open dataset, validation, and simulation.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Exploring the Guessing-Game Experimental Paradigm: Inferences From Closed- Versus Open-Ended Semantic Space.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- A lexical database of British Sign Language (BSL) and German Sign Language (DGS): Iconicity ratings, iconic strategies, and concreteness norms.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Exploring the dynamics of Shannon's information and iconicity in language processing and lexeme evolution.PloS one · 2025Article
- PHONETIC UNDERPINNINGS OF SOUND SYMBOLISM ACROSS MULTIPLE DOMAINS OF MEANING.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Gesture is the primary modality for language creation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- ThePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- What's in a JapaneseFrontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Processing different types of iconicity in Chinese transferred epithet comprehension: An ERP study.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Novel vocalizations are understood across cultures.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Phonation Types Matter in Sound Symbolism.Cognitive science · 2021Article
- Manual Gestures Modulate Early Neural Responses in Loudness Perception.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2021Article
- English Speakers Can Infer Pokémon Types Based on Sound Symbolism.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Gotta Name'em All: an Experimental Study on the Sound Symbolism of Pokémon Names in Brazilian Portuguese.Journal of psycholinguistic research · 2020Article
- A data-driven approach to the semantics of iconicity in American Sign Language and English.Language and cognition · 2020Article
- Innovation and enculturation in child communication: a cross-sectional study.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Vocal imitation of percussion sounds: On the perceptual similarity between imitations and imitated sounds.PloS one · 2019Article
- Language is more abstract than you think, or, why aren't languages more iconic?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Repeated imitation makes human vocalizations more word-like.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
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2 authors.
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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.
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