ArticleLanguage and cognition2020
A data-driven approach to the semantics of iconicity in American Sign Language and English.
Article in Language and cognition, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Iconicity and transparency in Dutch Sign Language.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Iconicity as an organizing principle of the lexicon.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- An ERP investigation of perceptual vs motoric iconicity in sign production.Neuropsychologia · 2024Article
- The Anatomy of Iconicity: Cumulative Structural Analogies Underlie Objective and Subjective Measures of Iconicity.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- Identifying the Correlations Between the Semantics and the Phonology of American Sign Language and British Sign Language: A Vector Space Approach.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Neurophysiological Correlates of Frequency, Concreteness, and Iconicity in American Sign Language.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2020Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
A growing body of research shows that both signed and spoken languages display regular patterns of iconicity in their vocabularies. We compared iconicity in the lexicons of American Sign Language (ASL) and English by combining previously collected ratings of ASL signs (Caselli, Sevcikova Sehyr, Cohen-Goldberg, & Emmorey, 2017) and English words (Winter, Perlman, Perry, & Lupyan, 2017) with the use of data-driven semantic vectors derived from English. Our analyses show that models of spoken language lexical semantics drawn from large text corpora can be useful for predicting the iconicity of signs as well as words. Compared to English, ASL has a greater number of regions of semantic space with concentrations of highly iconic vocabulary. There was an overall negative relationship between semantic density and the iconicity of both English words and ASL signs. This negative relationship disappeared for highly iconic signs, suggesting that iconic forms may be more easily discriminable in ASL than in English. Our findings contribute to an increasingly detailed picture of how iconicity is distributed across different languages.
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