Iconicity ratings across the Japanese lexicon: A comparative study with English

Abstract

Iconicity is a resemblance between form and meaning grounded in perceptuo-motor analogy. In speech, iconicity is understood as words “sounding like what they mean.” Studies on English and Spanish use ratings to identify words speakers consider iconic. Perry et al. (2015) show that English onomatopoeia are rated highest, followed by adjectives/verbs > nouns > function words. Our study replicates this for Japanese but, owing to additional variables, yields more nuanced findings. Word-class aside, Japanese speakers are more likely to rate words as iconic if they are an (1) ideophone > (2) Yamato/native prosaic word > or (3) non-Yamato prosaic word. For comparison, we reanalyzed English ratings from Perry et al. (2015), and found neither strata (Germanic, Latinate, French) nor historically iconic etymology had a significant effect. With these factors in mind, we propose that ratings reflect a word’s relationship to sensory information rather than iconicity.

Two measures are better than one: Combining iconicity ratings and guessing experiments for a more nuanced picture of iconicity in the lexicon

“…We also compared the distributions of guessing accuracies and mean iconicity ratings between the different methods. Since the iconicity ratings in this study were collected from naive participants who did not speak any Japanese, whereas rating studies more commonly use native speaker participants, we added one more plot to the figure showing the distribution of iconicity ratings in a separate study by Thompson et al (2020). Thompson et al collected iconicity ratings for Japanese words from native Japanese speaking participants.…”

“…The dots indicate the mean while the lines indicate 95% confidence intervals. Again, since these ratings were from non-Japanese speakers, we added data from Japanese speakers from Thompson et al (2020) as a comparison.…”

“…In iconicity rating tasks, the concept of iconicity is explained to participants, and participants are asked to rate the iconicity of given form-meaning pairs directly (e.g. Vinson et al 2008;Perry et al 2015;Winter et al 2017;Occhino et al 2017;Thompson et al 2020;Punselie 2020). Measurements from these studies have been found to correlate in meaningful ways with factors related to iconicity-e.g.…”

“…Measurements from these studies have been found to correlate in meaningful ways with factors related to iconicity-e.g. encoding of sensory information (Winter et al 2017), semantic domains (Punselie 2020), semantic neighbourhood density (Sidhu & Pexman 2018), word class (Perry et al 2015;Thompson et al 2020), age of acquisition (Vinson et al 2008;Perry et al 2015), facilitated processing (Thompson et al 2009;Occhino et al 2020), funniness and structural markedness (Dingemanse & Thompson 2020). However, ratings given are influenced by the linguistic experience of participants (Occhino et al 2017;Sevcikova Sehyr & Emmorey 2019), so some care is needed to ensure measures are taken from appropriate participant groups.…”

Cracking Arbitrariness: A Data-driven Study of Auditory Iconicity

“…The studies hereby discussed operationalized iconicity through subjective ratings; however, iconicity ratings have been criticized for having low construct validity. Thompson et al (2020) have proposed that participants might base their responses on semantics alone -and in particular on the word perceptual strength -, which would call for a different, and possibly objective measure of phonosemantic transparency. Additionally, the ability of language users to judge the fit of a sound with respect to its semantic representation has been often questioned, as it has been shown that participants have a positive bias when judging whether sounds fit their reference in their native language (Sutherland & Cimpian, 2015).…”