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Article published In:
Interaction and Iconicity in the Evolution of Language
Edited by Stefan Hartmann, Michael Pleyer, James Winters and Jordan Zlatev
[Interaction Studies 18:3] 2017
► pp. 443–464

Which words are most iconic?

Iconicity in English sensory words

| University of Birmingham |
|
| University of Miami |
| University of Wisconsin-Madison |

Some spoken words are iconic, exhibiting a resemblance between form and meaning. We used native speaker ratings to assess the iconicity of 3001 English words, analyzing their iconicity in relation to part-of-speech differences and differences between the sensory domain they relate to (sight, sound, touch, taste and smell). First, we replicated previous findings showing that onomatopoeia and interjections were highest in iconicity, followed by verbs and adjectives, and then nouns and grammatical words. We further show that words with meanings related to the senses are more iconic than words with abstract meanings. Moreover, iconicity is not distributed equally across sensory modalities: Auditory and tactile words tend to be more iconic than words denoting concepts related to taste, smell and sight. Last, we examined the relationship between iconicity (resemblance between form and meaning) and systematicity (statistical regularity between form and meaning). We find that iconicity in English words is more strongly related to sensory meanings than systematicity. Altogether, our results shed light on the extent and distribution of iconicity in modern English.

Keywords: sound symbolism, onomatopoeia, perception, sound, touch
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Iconicity and the senses
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Variables
    • 2.2Analyses
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Replication and extension of Perry et al. (2015)
    • 3.2Systematicity and iconicity
    • 3.3Sensory meanings and iconicity
    • 3.4Modality differences in iconicity
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.18.3.07win
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2021. Sound symbolism shapes the English language: The maluma/takete effect in English nouns. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 28:4 ► pp. 1390 ff. DOI logo
Slavova, Velina
2019. Towards emotion recognition in texts: A sound-symbolic experiment. International Journal of Cognitive Research in Science Engineering and Education 7:2 ► pp. 41 ff. DOI logo
Slavova, Velina
2020. Emotional Valence Coded in the Phonemic Content – Statistical Evidence Based on Corpus Analysis. Cybernetics and Information Technologies 20:2 ► pp. 3 ff. DOI logo
Speed, Laura J. & Asifa Majid
2020. Grounding language in the neglected senses of touch, taste, and smell. Cognitive Neuropsychology 37:5-6 ► pp. 363 ff. DOI logo
Strik Lievers, Francesca & Bodo Winter
2018. Sensory language across lexical categories. Lingua 204 ► pp. 45 ff. DOI logo
Thompson, Arthur Lewis, Kimi Akita & Youngah Do
2020. Iconicity ratings across the Japanese lexicon: A comparative study with English. Linguistics Vanguard 6:1 DOI logo
Thompson, Arthur Lewis & Youngah Do
2019. Defining iconicity: An articulation-based methodology for explaining the phonological structure of ideophones. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4:1 DOI logo
THOMPSON, BILL, MARCUS PERLMAN, GARY LUPYAN, ZED SEVCIKOVA SEHYR & KAREN EMMOREY
2020. A data-driven approach to the semantics of iconicity in American Sign Language and English. Language and Cognition 12:1 ► pp. 182 ff. DOI logo
Vergallito, Alessandra, Marco Alessandro Petilli & Marco Marelli
2020. Perceptual modality norms for 1,121 Italian words: A comparison with concreteness and imageability scores and an analysis of their impact in word processing tasks. Behavior Research Methods 52:4 ► pp. 1599 ff. DOI logo
Winter, Bodo, Gary Lupyan, Lynn K. Perry, Mark Dingemanse & Marcus Perlman
2023. Iconicity ratings for 14,000+ English words. Behavior Research Methods DOI logo
Winter, Bodo & Marcus Perlman
2021. Size sound symbolism in the English lexicon. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 6:1 DOI logo
Winter, Bodo & Marcus Perlman
2021. Iconicity ratings really do measure iconicity, and they open a new window onto the nature of language. Linguistics Vanguard 7:1 DOI logo
Winter, Bodo, Paula Pérez-Sobrino, Lucien Brown & Andriy Myachykov
2019. The sound of soft alcohol: Crossmodal associations between interjections and liquor. PLOS ONE 14:8 ► pp. e0220449 ff. DOI logo
Winter, Bodo, Márton Sóskuthy, Marcus Perlman & Mark Dingemanse
2022. Trilled /r/ is associated with roughness, linking sound and touch across spoken languages. Scientific Reports 12:1 DOI logo
Wu, Chenggang & Xin Mu
2024. Sensory experience ratings (SERs) for 1,130 Chinese words: relationships with other semantic and lexical psycholinguistic variables. Linguistics Vanguard 9:1 ► pp. 151 ff. DOI logo
Östling, Robert, Carl Börstell & Servane Courtaux
2018. Visual Iconicity Across Sign Languages: Large-Scale Automated Video Analysis of Iconic Articulators and Locations. Frontiers in Psychology 9 DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2019. Sensory Linguistics [Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research, 20], DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2019. Chapter 18. Conclusion. In Sensory Linguistics [Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research, 20], ► pp. 235 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2022. Sound–Emotion Interaction in Poetry [Linguistic Approaches to Literature, 39], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 31 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.