Iconicity as a General Property of Language: Evidence from Spoken and Signed Languages

241

187

One reason for the apparent gulf between animal and human communication systems is that the focus has been on the presence or the absence of language as a complex expressive system built on speech. But language normally occurs embedded within an interactional exchange of multi-modal signals. If this larger perspective takes central focus, then it becomes apparent that human communication has a layered structure, where the layers may be plausibly assigned different phylogenetic and evolutionary origins—especially in the light of recent thoughts on the emergence of voluntary breathing and spoken language. This perspective helps us to appreciate the different roles that the different modalities play in human communication, as well as how they function as one integrated system despite their different roles and origins. It also offers possibilities for reconciling the ‘gesture-first hypothesis’ with that of gesture and speech having evolved together, hand in hand—or hand in mouth, rather—as one system

Section: (B) Indexicality and Iconicity In Language Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: (B) Indexicality and Iconicity In Language Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The origin of human multi-modal communication

Levinson

Holler

2014

241

187

“…Yet, numerous nonIndo-European spoken languages include wide repertoires of iconic mappings, variously described as mimetic, ideophonic or sound-symbolic (e.g. sub-Saharan African languages, Australian Aboriginal languages, Japanese, Korean, Southeast Asian languages, indigenous languages of South America, and Balto-Finnic languages; see [19] for references). In these languages, iconicity is achieved by the systematic association of properties of vowels and consonants to properties of experiences.…”

Section: Language Studies: the Current Focus Approaches And Assumptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language as a multimodal phenomenon: implications for language learning, processing and evolution

Vigliocco¹,

Perniss

Vinson³

2014

Self Cite

188

131

Our understanding of the cognitive and neural underpinnings of language has traditionally been firmly based on spoken Indo-European languages and on language studied as speech or text. However, in face-to-face communication, language is multimodal: speech signals are invariably accompanied by visual information on the face and in manual gestures, and sign languages deploy multiple channels (hands, face and body) in utterance construction. Moreover, the narrow focus on spoken Indo-European languages has entrenched the assumption that language is comprised wholly by an arbitrary system of symbols and rules. However, iconicity (i.e. resemblance between aspects of communicative form and meaning) is also present: speakers use iconic ges- tures when they speak; many non-Indo-European spoken languages exhibit a substantial amount of iconicity in word forms and, finally, iconicity is the norm, rather than the exception in sign languages. This introduction provides the motivation for taking a multimodal approach to the study of language learning, processing and evolution, and discusses the broad implications of shifting our current dominant approaches and assumptions to encompass multimodal expression in both signed and spoken languages

“…Such a view has been the conventional perspective on vocabulary structure and language processing in the language sciences throughout much of the past century (see [3] for review). Since de Saussure's [1] notion of the arbitrariness of the sign, such a property has been assumed to be a language-universal property and has even assumed a definitional characteristic: according to Hockett [2], for instance, a communication system will not count as a language unless it demonstrates such arbitrariness.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…woof woof ) is one example of this absolute iconicity. Second, the sound -meaning mapping could be an instance of relative iconicity, where statistical regularities can be detected between similar sounds and similar meanings though these may not be restricted to imitative forms [3]. In this case, the iconicity is not transparent, but is generally only observable once knowledge of the sound-and meaningrelationships is determined.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How arbitrary is language?

Monaghan

Shillcock

Christiansen

et al. 2014

221

278

It is a long established convention that the relationship between sounds and meanings of words is essentially arbitrary—typically the sound of a word gives no hint of its meaning. However, there are numerous reported instances of systematic sound–meaning mappings in language, and this systematicity has been claimed to be important for early language development. In a large-scale corpus analysis of English, we show that sound–meaning mappings are more systematic than would be expected by chance. Furthermore, this systematicity is more pronounced for words involved in the early stages of language acquisition and reduces in later vocabulary development. We propose that the vocabulary is structured to enable systematicity in early language learning to promote language acquisition, while also incorporating arbitrariness for later language in order to facilitate communicative expressivity and efficiency.