ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Iconicity as an organizing principle of the lexicon.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Iconicity as an organizing principle of the lexicon.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- Perceptual-semantic features of words differentially shape early vocabulary in American Sign Language and English.Applied psycholinguistics · 2025Article
- An ERP investigation of perceptual vs motoric iconicity in sign production.Neuropsychologia · 2024Article
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6 authors.
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Abstract
The view that words are arbitrary is a foundational assumption about language, used to set human languages apart from nonhuman communication. We present here a study of the alignment between the semantic and phonological structure (systematicity) of American Sign Language (ASL), and for comparison, two spoken languages-English and Spanish. Across all three languages, words that are semantically related are more likely to be phonologically related, highlighting systematic alignment between word form and word meaning. Critically, there is a significant effect of iconicity (a perceived physical resemblance between word form and word meaning) on this alignment: words are most likely to be phonologically related when they are semantically related and iconic. This phenomenon is particularly widespread in ASL: half of the signs in the ASL lexicon are
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