“How do you even know what ideophones mean?”

Nuckolls, Janis B.

doi:10.1075/gest.20005.nuc

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 31 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Curiously, ideophones in the visual modality ( color‐visual, shape, motion ) were guessed worst. This may be due to the lack of supporting gestures that often co‐occur with ideophones (Nuckolls, 2020).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Iconicity in Ideophones: Guessing, Memorizing, and Reassessing

Hoey

Thompson

et al. 2023

Cognitive Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Iconicity, or the resemblance between form and meaning, is often ascribed to a special status and contrasted with default assumptions of arbitrariness in spoken language. But does iconicity in spoken language have a special status when it comes to learnability? A simple way to gauge learnability is to see how well something is retrieved from memory. We can further contrast this with guessability, to see (1) whether the ease of guessing the meanings of ideophones outperforms the rate at which they are remembered; and (2) how willing participants’ are to reassess what they were taught in a prior task—a novel contribution of this study. We replicate prior guessing and memory tasks using ideophones and adjectives from Japanese, Korean, and Igbo. Our results show that although native Cantonese speakers guessed ideophone meanings above chance level, they memorized both ideophones and adjectives with comparable accuracy. However, response time data show that participants took significantly longer to respond correctly to adjective–meaning pairs—indicating a discrepancy in a cognitive effort that favored the recognition of ideophones. In a follow‐up reassessment task, participants who were taught foil translations were more likely to choose the true translations for ideophones rather than adjectives. By comparing the findings from our guessing and memory tasks, we conclude that iconicity is more accessible if a task requires participants to actively seek out sound‐meaning associations.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Iconicity in Ideophones: Guessing, Memorizing, and Reassessing

Hoey

Thompson

et al. 2023

Cognitive Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Neurological evidence for the context-independent multisensorial semantics of ideophones in Pastaza Kichwa: an fNIRS study in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Dewey,

Green,

Nuckolls

et al. 2024

Lang. cogn.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Ideophones – imitative words using the stream of speech to simulate/depict the rise and fall of sensory perceptions and emotions and temporal experiences of completiveness, instantaneousness, and repetitiveness – have been characterized as semantically empty and context-dependent. The research reported here tested a simple schematic for the semantic categories of Pastaza Kichwa ideophones by tracking neurological responses to ideophones categorized as VISUAL, MOTION, and SOUND. Seventeen native speakers of Pastaza Kichwa listened to audio clips of ideophones extracted from sentential contexts. Subjects’ neural activity was assessed using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Results demonstrate that these posited semantic categories activate areas of the brain associated with visualization, motion, and sound processing and production, respectively. This suggests that these ideophones convey semantic information related to these concepts, independent of context. This contrasts with what would be expected by theories suggesting that ideophones on their own are semantically empty. The data give rise to questions regarding whether any language contains only sound ideophones that do not carry additional sensory information and whether ideophones in previous studies treated strictly as sound ideophones might require greater specification of their semantics, specifically from a multisensorial perspective.

show abstract

A recurring absence gesture in Northern Pastaza Kichwa

Rice

2022

GEST

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this paper I posit the use of a spread-fingered hand torque gesture among speakers of Northern Pastaza Kichwa (Quechuan, Ecuador) as a recurrent gesture conveying the semantic theme of absence. The data come from a documentary video corpus collected by multiple researchers. The gesture prototypically takes the form of at least one pair of rapid rotations of the palm (the torque). Fingers can be spread or slightly flexed towards the palm to varying degrees. This gesture is performed in a consistent manner across speakers (and expressions) and co-occurs with a set of speech strings with related semantic meanings. Taking a cognitive linguistic approach, I analyse the form, function, and contexts of this gesture and argue that, taken together, it should be considered a recurrent gesture that indicates absence.

show abstract

“How do you even know what ideophones mean?”

Cited by 5 publications

References 31 publications

Iconicity in Ideophones: Guessing, Memorizing, and Reassessing

Iconicity in Ideophones: Guessing, Memorizing, and Reassessing

Neurological evidence for the context-independent multisensorial semantics of ideophones in Pastaza Kichwa: an fNIRS study in the Ecuadorian Amazon

A recurring absence gesture in Northern Pastaza Kichwa

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About