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

Abstract

Iconicity in language is receiving increased attention from many fields, but our understanding of iconicity is only as good as the measures we use to quantify it. We collected iconicity measures for 304 Japanese words from English-speaking participants, using rating and guessing tasks. The words included ideophones (structurally marked depictive words) along with regular lexical items from similar semantic domains (e.g., fuwafuwa ‘fluffy’, jawarakai ‘soft’). The two measures correlated, speaking to their validity. However, ideophones received consistently higher iconicity ratings than other items, even when guessed at the same accuracies, suggesting the rating task is more sensitive to cues like structural markedness that frame words as iconic. These cues did not always guide participants to the meanings of ideophones in the guessing task, but they did make them more confident in their guesses, even when they were wrong. Consistently poor guessing results reflect the role different experiences play in shaping construals of iconicity. Using multiple measures in tandem allows us to explore the interplay between iconicity and these external factors. To facilitate this, we introduce a reproducible workflow for creating rating and guessing tasks from standardised wordlists, while also making improvements to the robustness, sensitivity and discriminability of previous approaches.

What ratings and corpus data reveal about the vividness of Mandarin ABB words

“…It also makes conclusions based on the assumption that all Pokémon names display iconic qualities in equal manners, without considering familiarity or frequency effects at play (Kawahara et al, 2018). Fortunately, we also observe critical warnings about iconicity effects driven by associating iconic features with known words rather than grounded in perceived structural form-meaning mappings (McLean et al, 2023;Thompson et al, 2020, but see Winter & Perlman, 2021, as well as the body of work to which we wish to contribute: subjective ratings that are informed by other ratings (Dingemanse & Thompson, 2020;Winter et al, 2023), that are contrasted with other kinds of evidence such as the corpus (Klavan & Divjak, 2016), or that are compared to different sets (Perlman et al, 2018). In conclusion, we are hopeful that vivid words will continue to receive more multivariate treatments in the future.…”