Iconicity Gives Communicators a Head-Start, Even if Only the Producer Experiences It

Iconicity has increasingly come to be recognized as widespread in language. It plays a particularly important role in bootstrapping new referring expressions in existing languages and in the emergence of new languages and other communication systems. The basis of this role has long been assumed to depend primarily on transparency of the iconic signal for the receiver, who benefits from being better able to identify its meaning. But might there also be producer-side advantages, distinct from this transparency-based comprehension benefit, that support communication? We investigated this using an experimental referential communication game in which dyads used a novel signaling medium to communicate fruits and vegetables. We manipulated both whether the producer could generate iconic signals and whether the receiver saw iconic or arbitrary signals. Results suggested that there was an iconicity benefit via stability in production even if the receiver was unable to perceive the iconicity (and therefore unable to benefit from transparency). However, while this gave dyads a substantial head-start, the lack of a benefit from iconicity for the receiver meant dyads in this condition still performed significantly less well overall than dyads with full iconicity.