Combinatorial structure of iconic strategies in the manual-visual modality: evidence from silent gestures by hearing non-signers

Iconicity, understood as perceived resemblance between aspects of form and meaning, provides a central basis for representing conceptual information in the manual-visual modality. Previous research on silent gesture has shown systematic associations between semantic categories and particular iconic strategies, with several strategies sometimes used together to represent a concept. How these strategies are organized when they are used together, however, remains less well understood. Using an individually administered task adapted from an established silent gesture paradigm, we elicited silent gestures from 38 Mandarin-speaking hearing non-signers to represent 246 concepts spanning concrete and abstract conceptual categories. We examined how concreteness and conceptual category were related to the occurrence of combinations and how meaningful manual units were organized sequentially, simultaneously, or in mixed structures. Our results show that most manual productions contained a single meaningful unit. Concrete concepts were more likely than abstract concepts to elicit combinations overall and simultaneous-only combinations, while conceptual category was associated with all three organizational formats. Sequential combinations were the most frequent, with drawing and embodying tending to precede acting, while pointing and schema mapping tended to precede symbolic mapping. Simultaneous combinations were characterized by recurrent pairings across the hands, especially acting with embodying and representing with locating, and broader iconicity-type pairings varied across conceptual categories. Mixed combinations were rare but clustered in concepts that invited both temporal staging and bimanual integration. Our findings extend patterned iconicity beyond the selection of individual form-meaning mappings to the relations among multiple iconic depictions. They show that the manual-visual modality provides temporal and spatial resources through which conceptual relations can be externalized and systematically organized even in the absence of an established sign language system.