Iconicity has traditionally been considered an objective, fixed, unidimensional property of language forms, often operationalized as transparency for experimental purposes. Within a Cognitive Linguistics framework, iconicity is a mapping between an individual’s construal of form and construal of meaning, such that iconicity is subjective, dynamic, and multidimensional. We test the latter alternative by asking signers who differed in ASL proficiency to complete a handshape monitoring task in which we manipulated the number of form–meaning construals that target handshapes participated in. We estimated the interaction of iconicity, proficiency, and construal density using mixed-effects models for response time and accuracy with crossed random effects for participants and items.

Results show a significant three-way interaction between iconicity, proficiency, and construal density such that less-proficient signers detected handshapes in more iconic signs faster than less iconic signs regardless of the handshape they were monitoring, but highly proficient signers’ performance was only improved by iconicity for handshapes that participate in many construals. Taken in conjunction with growing evidence of the subjectivity of iconicity, we interpret these results as support for the claim that construal is a core mechanism underlying iconicity, both for transparent and systematic language-internal form–meaning mappings.

A central question in language acquisition is how children master sentence types that they have seldom, if ever, heard. Here we report the findings of a pre-registered, randomised, single-blind intervention study designed to test the prediction that, for one such sentence type, complex questions (e.g., Is the crocodile who’s hot eating?), children could combine schemas learned, on the basis of the input, for complex noun phrases (the [THING] who’s [PROPERTY]) and simple questions (Is [THING] [ACTION]ing?) to yield a complex-question schema (Is [the [THING] who’s [PROPERTY]] ACTIONing?). Children aged 4;2 to 6;8 (M = 5;6, SD = 7.7 months) were trained on simple questions (e.g., Is the bird cleaning?) and either (Experimental group, N = 61) complex noun phrases (e.g., the bird who’s sad) or (Control group, N = 61) matched simple noun phrases (e.g., the sad bird). In general, the two groups did not differ on their ability to produce novel complex questions at test. However, the Experimental group did show (a) some evidence of generalising a particular complex NP schema (the [THING] who’s [PROPERTY] as opposed to the [THING] that’s [PROPERTY]) from training to test, (b) a lower rate of auxiliary-doubling errors (e.g., *Is the crocodile who’s hot is eating?), and (c) a greater ability to produce complex questions on the first test trial. We end by suggesting some different methods – specifically artificial language learning and syntactic priming – that could potentially be used to better test the present account.

Categorisation is arguably the most important organising principle in semantic memory. However, elements that are not in a categorical relation can be dynamically grouped together when the context provides a common theme for these elements. In the field of sentence (and discourse) comprehension, alternatives to a focused element can be thought of as a set of elements determined by a theme given in the utterance context. According to Alternative Semantics (Rooth, 1985, 1992), the main function of linguistic focus is to introduce a set of alternatives to the focused element within an utterance. Here, we will investigate the contribution of the utterance context to the composition of focus alternative sets. Specifically, we test whether a focus alternative set can contain elements that belong to different taxonomic categories (i.e., that are not closely semantically related). Using a behavioural probe recognition experiment, we show that participants activate elements from another taxonomic category than the focused element as part of sentence comprehension. This finding suggests that the composition of a focus alternative set is not simply based on semantic relations between the members of the set and the focused element, but that contextual relations also play a crucial role.

Reaction times for a translation recognition study are reported where novice to expert English–ASL bilinguals rejected English translation distractors for ASL signs that were related to the correct translations through phonology, semantics, or both form and meaning (diagrammatic iconicity). Imageability ratings of concepts impacted performance in all conditions; when imageability was high, participants showed interference for phonologically related distractors, and when imageability was low participants showed interference for semantically related distractors, regardless of proficiency. For diagrammatically related distractors high imageability caused interference in experts, but low imageability caused interference in novices. These patterns suggest that imageability and diagrammaticity interact with proficiency – experts process diagrammatic related distractors phonologically, but novices process them semantically. This implies that motivated signs are dependent on the entrenchment of language systematicity; rather than decreasing their impact on language processing as proficiency grows, they build on the original benefit conferred by iconic mappings.

In contrast to arbitrariness, a recent perspective is that words contain both arbitrary and iconic aspects. We investigated iconicity in word recognition, and the possibility that iconic words have special links between phonological and semantic features that may facilitate their processing. In Experiment 1, participants completed a lexical decision task (“Is this letter string a word?”) including words varying in their iconicity. Notably, we manipulated stimulus presentation conditions such that the items were visually degraded for half of the participants; this manipulation has been shown to increase reliance on phonology. Responses to words higher in iconicity were faster and more accurate, but this did not interact with condition. In Experiment 2 we explicitly directed participants’ attention to phonology by using a phonological lexical decision task (“Does this letter string sound like a word?”). Responses to words that were higher in iconicity were once again faster. These results demonstrate facilitatory effects of iconicity in lexical processing, thus showing that the benefits of iconic mappings extend beyond those reported for language learning and those argued for language evolution.

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.

Words like ‘waddle’, ‘flop’, and ‘zigzag’ combine playful connotations with iconic form–meaning resemblances. Here we propose that structural markedness may be a common factor underlying perceptions of playfulness and iconicity. Using collected and estimated lexical ratings covering a total of over 70,000 English words, we assess the robustness of this association. We identify cues of phonotactic complexity that covary with funniness and iconicity ratings and that, we propose, serve as metacommunicative signals to draw attention to words as playful and performative. To assess the generalisability of the findings we develop a method to estimate lexical ratings from distributional semantics and apply it to a dataset 20 times the size of the original set of human ratings. The method can be used more generally to extend coverage of lexical ratings. We find that it reliably reproduces correlations between funniness and iconicity as well as cues of structural markedness, though it also amplifies biases present in the human ratings. Our study shows that the playful and the poetic are part of the very texture of the lexicon.