Iconicity as structure mapping

Emmorey, Karen

doi:10.1098/rstb.2013.0301

Cited by 151 publications

(132 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…meaning visibility can also encompass more subtle elements of meaning (7,8). For example, recent sign language research has proposed that sign languages sometimes use systems of "structural iconicity," in which properties of denotations are preserved by geometric properties of signs (8,9,13,14).…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Sign languages have much in common with spoken languages in that they are complex, diverse, and rich in their morphosyntactic structure (10), and their use is supported by similar neural circuitry to that used in spoken languages (11,12). In at least some cases, sign languages overtly mark certain elements of meaning that can be morphologically hidden in spoken language (8,9,13,14). Here we exploit this tendency of sign languages to ask whether knowledge of how to map "event telicity" (explained further below) into visual signs may be universal and therefore (i) be encoded similarly across a range of sign languages with diverse historical origins and (ii) be accessible even by nonsigners lacking experience with sign languages.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases

Strickland

Geraci

Chemla

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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According to a theoretical tradition dating back to Aristotle, verbs can be classified into two broad categories. Telic verbs (e.g., “decide,” “sell,” “die”) encode a logical endpoint, whereas atelic verbs (e.g., “think,” “negotiate,” “run”) do not, and the denoted event could therefore logically continue indefinitely. Here we show that sign languages encode telicity in a seemingly universal way and moreover that even nonsigners lacking any prior experience with sign language understand these encodings. In experiments 1–5, nonsigning English speakers accurately distinguished between telic (e.g., “decide”) and atelic (e.g., “think”) signs from (the historically unrelated) Italian Sign Language, Sign Language of the Netherlands, and Turkish Sign Language. These results were not due to participants' inferring that the sign merely imitated the action in question. In experiment 6, we used pseudosigns to show that the presence of a salient visual boundary at the end of a gesture was sufficient to elicit telic interpretations, whereas repeated movement without salient boundaries elicited atelic interpretations. Experiments 7–10 confirmed that these visual cues were used by all of the sign languages studied here. Together, these results suggest that signers and nonsigners share universally accessible notions of telicity as well as universally accessible “mapping biases” between telicity and visual form.

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Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases

Strickland

Geraci

Chemla

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Like Emmorey [57], the authors advocate moving away from the treatment of iconicity as a monolithic concept, differentiating between more abstract processes of structural alignment that would be involved in establishing more abstract, indirect iconic relationships and more basic and direct processes of alignment based on imitation and visual overlap. Perniss and Vigliocco take a broad perspective and offer an overarching, unified view of iconicity as playing a fundamental role in language (both spoken and signed), across evolution, development and processing.…”

Section: (B) the Iconicity Of Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Taking sign languages as a starting point, where iconic mappings are readily visible, Emmorey [57] suggests that structure-mapping theory [58,59] provides such a framework.…”

Section: (B) the Iconicity Of Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

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

Vigliocco¹,

Perniss

Vinson³

2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

188

131

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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

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“…In addition to iconicity in speech, spoken languages are usually accompanied by the so-called iconic gestures which are manual depictions of the objects and events described in co-occurring speech (e.g., a curved handshape moving towards the mouth accompanying the verb drink) (McNeill, 1992). The sign languages of the deaf communities stand out for their prevalence of a large number of linguistic labels whose forms are motivated by the features of their referents (Cuxac, 1999;Emmorey, 2014;Klima & Bellugi, 1979;Padden, Hwang, Lepic, & Seegers, 2015;Perniss et al, 2010;Pietrandrea, 2002;Taub, 2001). Furthermore, a myriad of empirical studies employing linguistic, ethnographic, behavioural and neurological methods has produced strong evidence showing that iconicity is a common feature of spoken and signed languages (Dingemanse et al, 2015;Vigliocco et al, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Type of iconicity matters in the vocabulary development of signing children.

Ortega

Sumer

Özyürek

2017

Developmental Psychology

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Recent research on signed as well as spoken language shows that the iconic features of the target language might play a role in language development. Here we ask further whether different types of iconic depictions modulate children's preferences for certain types of signreferent links during vocabulary development for objects in sign language. Results from a picture description task indicate that lexical signs with two possible variants are used in different proportions by deaf signers from different age groups. While pre-school and schoolaged children favoured variants representing actions associated with their referent (e.g., a writing hand for the sign PEN), adults preferred variants representing the perceptual features of those objects (e.g., upwards index finger representing a thin, elongated object for the sign PEN). Deaf parents interacting with their children, however, used action and perceptual based variants in equal proportion and favoured action variants more than adults signing to other adults. We propose that when children are confronted with two variants for the same concept, they initially prefer action-based variants because they give them the opportunity to link a linguistic label to familiar schemas linked to their action/motor experiences. Our results echo findings showing a bias for action based depictions in the development of iconic co-speech gestures suggesting a modality bias for such representations during development.

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Iconicity as structure mapping

Cited by 151 publications

References 41 publications

Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases

Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases

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

Type of iconicity matters in the vocabulary development of signing children.

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