Boundaries in space and time: Iconic biases across modalities

Abstract

The idea that the form of a word reflects information about its meaning has its roots in Platonic philosophy, and has been experimentally investigated for concrete, sensory-based properties since the early 20th century. Here, we provide evidence for an abstract property of 'boundedness' that introduces a systematic, iconic bias on the phonological expectations of a novel lexicon. We show that this abstract property is general across events and objects. In Experiment 1, we show that subjects are systematically more likely to associate sign language signs that end with a gestural boundary with telic verbs (denoting events with temporal boundaries, e.g., die, arrive) and with count nouns (denoting objects with spatial boundaries, e.g., ball, coin). In Experiments 2-3, we show that this iconic mapping acts on conceptual representations, not on grammatical features. Specifically, the mapping does not carry over to psychological nouns (e.g. people are not more likely to associate a gestural boundary with idea than with knowledge). Although these psychological nouns are still syntactically encoded as either count or mass, they do not denote objects that are conceived of as having spatial boundaries. The mapping bias thus breaks down. Experiments 4-5 replicate these findings with a new set of stimuli. Finally, in Experiments 6-11, we explore possible extensions to a similar bias for spoken language stimuli, with mixed results. Generally, the results here suggest that 'boundedness' of words' referents (in space or time) has a powerful effect on intuitions regarding the form that the words should take.

Visual Form and Event Semantics Predict Transitivity in Silent Gestures: Evidence for Compositionality

“…For instance, constructs pre‐evolved for vision—such as the detection of deceleration, jerk, and duration of movement—have been co‐opted by the linguistic system in unrelated sign languages (Malaia & Wilbur, 2012; Malaia, Wilbur, & Milković, 2013). One feature in particular, the rapid deceleration of the hand(s) toward a point in space, guides nonsigner judgments in the segmentation of naturalistic (Zacks et al., 2001, 2009), communicative, and linguistic actions (Krebs, Wilbur, Reehm, & Malaia; Kuhn et al., 2021; Strickland et al., 2015), though data are still missing from gesture production. The recruitment of constructs already available in other cognitive domains for the coding of grammatical phenomena is thus independently motivated.…”

“…Beyond constituent ordering, a connection between grammar, meaning, representation, and cognition has been demonstrated across a number of diverse linguistic phenomena in sign language with explicit extensions to gesture (boundedness: Wilbur, 2008; Malaia & Wilbur, 2012; Strickland et al., 2015; Kuhn, Geraci, Schlenker, & Strickland, 2021; scalar structure: Aristodemo & Geraci, 2018, Wilbur, Malaia, & Shay, 2012; motion events: Schembri et al., 2005; discourse reference: Schlenker & Chemla, 2018), suggesting that these mappings are more pervasive and explanatory than previously thought. To that end, we ground our results in the multidisciplinary literature on manual action, and suggest that constructs originally adapted for manual action production and perception constitute the subunits in a complex handshape, and thus constrain the form a silent gesture may have.…”

Structural iconicity in silent gesture

“…A well-worked example comes from the discussion of the iconic sources of telicity/boundedness in sign languages: Wilbur (2003; shows that the addition of a gestural boundary, realized as a sharp deceleration towards a point or plane in the signing space, characterizes verbs denoting telic events. Further, Strickland et al (2015) and Kuhn et al (2021) show that non-signers are perceptive of this boundary when viewing unfamiliar and artificial signs. In turn, telic predicates are standardly analyzed as involving additional syntactic structure (e.g., Ramchand 2008;Borer 2005).…”

“…For instance, one of the most well-researched areas is the representation of constituent ordering patterns in silent gesture, both at the level of the sentence (Hall, Ferreira, and Mayberry 2014;So, Kita, and Goldin-Meadow 2009;Meir et al 2017, inter alia) and within the nominal domain (Culbertson, Schouwstra, and Kirby 2020;Schouwstra, Kirby, and Culbertson 2017), with the aim of explaining linguistic typology as a partial result of innate cognitive biases. Further, other researchers have probed non-signers' production of grammatical constructions in silent gesture, and comprehension of sign language grammar in perception (e.g., telicity: Strickland et al 2015;Kuhn et al 2021; agreement/reference tracking: Schlenker and Chemla 2018; distributivity: Marshall and Morgan 2015; motion events: Schembri, Jones, and Burnham 2005;inter alia).…”

Acquisition of non-canonical word orders in Mandarin Chinese

“…Therefore, we kept only random intercepts in our final model. The same treatment of random slopes can be found in other psycholinguistic work (e.g., Kuhn et al, 2021;Lee and Kaiser, 2021). All models were fit using glmer function of the lme4 package in R Project for Statistical Computing (R-Core-Team, 2012).…”