Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Iconic signs are not necessarily transparent (i.e., easily guessable) because iconicity is a perceived phenomenon that depends on the interpretation of a subjective human perceiver. Nevertheless, previous work has shown that some iconic signs are systematically relatively transparent: people can guess their meanings more easily than those of other signs. In this study, we demonstrate that iconicity constrains response diversity. Specifically, more iconic signs elicit a narrower range of guesses, and these guesses are semantically closer to the intended meaning than those elicited by less iconic signs. Context further strengthens this relationship between iconicity and response diversity, whereas the cross-linguistic frequency of a sign's underlying motivation does not. We argue that these findings warrant a reevaluation of earlier studies claiming that people are generally poor at guessing the meaning of iconic signs, and that iconicity is therefore purely subjective. If signs rated as more iconic produce fewer guesses that are nonetheless semantically closer to the target meaning, then even incorrect responses reveal sensitivity to the iconic motivations underlying sign forms. With even minimal contextual support, iconicity may be less subjective than often assumed.