An elicitation task was conducted with speakers of Japonic varieties to investigate whether stimuli of varying sensory modalities (e.g. audio, visual, tactile etc.) were more or less likely to elicit ideophones or iconic words. Stimuli representing sounds, movements, shapes and textures were most likely to elicit ideophones, and this is posited to reflect the relative ease or naturalness with which these domains can be mapped iconically to speech. The results mirror macro-level patterns of linguistic diversity, as these are also domains in which ideophones are most widely attested cross-linguistically. The findings call for the revision of a previously constructed implicational hierarchy for the semantic development of ideophone systems, adding to it the categories of FORM and TEXTURE as domains in which ideophones are most likely to develop, after SOUND and MOVEMENT. Independent evidence for the revised hierarchy comes from a semantic analysis of the elicited ideophones, where it was found that domains early in the hierarchy were more likely to be sources for semantic extension, while later domains were more likely to be targets. These findings are expected to be replicable for other languages, and offer exciting new directions for research into the semantic typology of ideophones.
Iconicity in language is receiving increased attention from many fields, but our understanding of the roles of iconicity in language is only as good as the measures we use to quantify it. We conducted iconicity rating and guessing experiments with 304 Japanese ideophones and prosaic words with sensory meanings, e.g. fuwafuwa ‘fluffy’, jawarakai ‘soft’. For both word groups, ratings and guesses were positively correlated—suggesting the two measures pick up on the same associations. Ideophones were consistently associated with higher iconicity ratings, but not higher guessing accuracy. We suggest that the structural markedness of ideophones enhances their perceived iconicity in the rating task, but does not provide any advantage (over and above form-meaning associations) in the guessing task. Thus, guesses and ratings could be used together to tease apart the relative contribution of structural markedness to iconic effects. Some ideophones were also poorly guessed, highlighting that construals of iconicity can be language-specific. Finally, we present some methodological contributions, including a new guessing paradigm that improves on the robustness, sensitivity and discriminability of previous approaches, and a reproducible workflow for creating rating and guessing experiments with a Python package, icotools, which we hope will improve comparability between future studies.
Iconicity in language is receiving increased attention from many fields, but our understanding of iconicity is only as good as the measures we use to quantify it. We collected iconicity measures for 304 Japanese words from English-speaking participants, using rating and guessing tasks. The words included ideophones (structurally marked depictive words) along with regular lexical items from similar semantic domains (e.g., fuwafuwa ‘fluffy’, jawarakai ‘soft’). The two measures correlated, speaking to their validity. However, ideophones received consistently higher iconicity ratings than other items, even when guessed at the same accuracies, suggesting the rating task is more sensitive to cues like structural markedness that frame words as iconic. These cues did not always guide participants to the meanings of ideophones in the guessing task, but they did make them more confident in their guesses, even when they were wrong. Consistently poor guessing results reflect the role different experiences play in shaping construals of iconicity. Using multiple measures in tandem allows us to explore the interplay between iconicity and these external factors. To facilitate this, we introduce a reproducible workflow for creating rating and guessing tasks from standardised wordlists, while also making improvements to the robustness, sensitivity and discriminability of previous approaches.
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