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Abstract
Signed languages exhibit iconicity (resemblance between form and meaning) across their
vocabulary, and many non-Indo-European spoken languages feature sizable classes of
iconic words known as ideophones. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English
and Spanish are believed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic
words. In three experiments with English and two with Spanish, we asked native speakers
to rate the iconicity of ~600 words from the English and Spanish MacArthur-Bates Communicative
Developmental Inventories. We found that iconicity in the words of both languages
varied in a theoretically meaningful way with lexical category. In both languages,
adjectives were rated as more iconic than nouns and function words, and corresponding
to typological differences between English and Spanish in verb semantics, English
verbs were rated as relatively iconic compared to Spanish verbs. We also found that
both languages exhibited a negative relationship between iconicity ratings and age
of acquisition. Words learned earlier tended to be more iconic, suggesting that iconicity
in early vocabulary may aid word learning. Altogether these findings show that iconicity
is a graded quality that pervades vocabularies of even the most “arbitrary” spoken
languages. The findings provide compelling evidence that iconicity is an important
property of all languages, signed and spoken, including Indo-European languages.