Iconicity in Ideophones: Guessing, Memorizing, and Reassessing

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Iconicity, the form-meaning resemblance in language, is often contrasted with arbitrariness.
• The learnability of iconic versus arbitrary linguistic forms remains an area of investigation.
• Ideophones, or sound-symbolic words, offer a unique window into exploring iconicity in spoken language.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether iconicity confers a learnability advantage in spoken language.
• To compare the guessability and memorability of ideophones versus arbitrary adjectives.
• To assess participants' willingness to reassess learned translations for iconic and arbitrary words.

Main Methods:

• Replication of guessing and memory tasks using Japanese, Korean, and Igbo ideophones and adjectives.
• Analysis of response times to gauge cognitive effort in recognizing word-meaning pairs.
• A novel reassessment task involving foil translations to evaluate belief revision.

Main Results:

• Native Cantonese speakers demonstrated above-chance guessing of ideophone meanings.
• Memorization accuracy for ideophones and adjectives was comparable.
• Response times indicated greater cognitive ease in recognizing ideophone meanings.
• Participants were more likely to retain correct ideophone translations over foils.

Conclusions:

• Iconicity may not significantly enhance memorization accuracy but does reduce cognitive effort.
• The ease of guessing and reassessment suggests that iconicity enhances the accessibility of sound-meaning associations.
• Active engagement in seeking sound-meaning links, characteristic of iconicity, appears crucial for its learnability advantage.