Relationships Between Subjective Iconicity Ratings and Phonological Variables in English and Spanish

Iconicity (the extent to which word forms resemble their meanings) is proposed to be based on universally accessible form mappings that depict/express sensory imagery. In the present study, we explored phonological structural features proposed to be characteristic of iconicity and subjective iconicity ratings in two large English and Spanish datasets. Restricting analyses to words with good rating agreement across participants, we show that the distributions of iconicity ratings differ considerably between the two languages, with far fewer Spanish words rated as iconic. Multiple regression analyses showed that structural markedness significantly predicted iconicity ratings in both languages, although the relationship was weaker in Spanish. Highly rated English forms included many phonaesthemes, that is, words with systematic sound-meaning mappings that can be iconic or non-iconic. Surprisingly, English and Spanish words rated higher in iconicity had larger phonological neighbourhoods despite comprising less frequently occurring phoneme sequences. In English, words rated as more iconic were also more likely to be polysemes (i.e. convey multiple, metaphorically-related meanings) than linked to a specific sensory meaning. Regression models revealed phonological/phonetic features, syllable structures and reduplications predicted significant proportions of variance in both English (33.3%) and Spanish iconicity ratings (50.8%), demonstrating both common and language-specific mappings. While our findings support the qualified use of subjective ratings for cross-linguistic comparisons of iconicity, we recommend researchers control for systematicity and polysemy and consider using additional/alternative measures to exclude non-iconic forms.