Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Theories like the picture superiority effect prove that visual information is vital in the acquisition of knowledge, suchas in language learning. Words can be graphically represented to illustrate the meaning of a message and facilitate itsunderstanding, but this rarely applies to abstract words. The current research turns to sign languages to explore thecommon semantic elements that link abstract words to each other, pointing towards the possibility of creating clusters oficonic meanings. By using sign language insight and VerbNets organisation of verb predicates, this study presents a novelorganisation of 500 English abstract verbs classified by visual shape. Graphic animation was used to visually represent 20classes of abstract verbs (see on www.vroav.online). An online survey was created to achieve judgements on the graphicvisuals representativeness. Significant agreement between participants suggests a positive way forward for further researchand applications within multimodal communication and computer assisted learning.