ArticleLanguage and cognition2019
The perceived mapping between form and meaning in American Sign Language depends on linguistic knowledge and task: evidence from iconicity and transparency judgments.
Article in Language and cognition, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Producing concept-motivated signs supports learning of STEM in American Sign Language.NPJ science of learning · 2026Article
- Iconicity and transparency in Dutch Sign Language.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Iconicity Gives Communicators a Head-Start, Even if Only the Producer Experiences It.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- The Relationship Between Community Size and Iconicity in Sign Languages.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- A lexical database of British Sign Language (BSL) and German Sign Language (DGS): Iconicity ratings, iconic strategies, and concreteness norms.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Playing With Language in the Manual Modality: Which Motions Do Signers Gradiently Modify?Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Semantic processing of iconic signs is not automatic: Neural evidence from hearing non-signers.Bilingualism (Cambridge, England) · 2025Article
- Article
- Iconicity Emerges From Language Experience: Evidence From Japanese Ideophones and Their English Equivalents.Cognitive science · 2024Article
- An ERP investigation of perceptual vs motoric iconicity in sign production.Neuropsychologia · 2024Article
- Neural effects differ for learning highly iconic versus non-iconic signs in hearing adults.Bilingualism (Cambridge, England) · 2024Article
- Feeling signs: motor encoding enhances sign language learning in hearing adults.Studies in second language acquisition · 2024Article
- Iconicity ratings for 14,000+ English words.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- The Anatomy of Iconicity: Cumulative Structural Analogies Underlie Objective and Subjective Measures of Iconicity.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- Gesture links language and cognition for spoken and signed languages.Nature reviews psychology · 2023Article
- The iconic motivation for the morphophonological distinction between noun-verb pairs in American Sign Language does not reflect common human construals of objects and actions.Language and cognition · 2022Article
- Do parents modify child-directed signing to emphasize iconicity?Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Article
- Breaking Into Language in a New Modality: The Role of Input and Individual Differences in Recognising Signs.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- New Perspectives on the Neurobiology of Sign Languages.Frontiers in communication · 2021Article
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Abstract
Iconicity is often defined as the resemblance between a form and a given meaning, while transparency is defined as the ability to infer a given meaning based on the form. This study examined the influence of knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL) on the perceived iconicity of signs and the relationship between iconicity, transparency (correctly guessed signs), 'perceived transparency' (transparency ratings of the guesses), and 'semantic potential' (the diversity (H index) of guesses). Experiment 1 compared iconicity ratings by deaf ASL signers and hearing non-signers for 991 signs from the ASL-LEX database. Signers and non-signers' ratings were highly correlated; however, the groups provided different iconicity ratings for subclasses of signs: nouns vs. verbs, handling vs. entity, and one- vs. two-handed signs. In Experiment 2, non-signers guessed the meaning of 430 signs and rated them for how transparent their guessed meaning would be for others. Only 10% of guesses were correct. Iconicity ratings correlated with transparency (correct guesses), perceived transparency ratings, and semantic potential (H index). Further, some iconic signs were perceived as non-transparent and vice versa. The study demonstrates that linguistic knowledge mediates perceived iconicity distinctly from gesture and highlights critical distinctions between iconicity, transparency (perceived and objective), and semantic potential.
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