Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Iconic words are known to exhibit an imitative relationshipbetween a word and its referent. Many studies have workedto pinpoint sound-to-meaning correspondences for ideophonesfrom different languages. The correspondence patterns showsimilarities across languages, but what makes such language-specific correspondences universal, as iconicity claims to be,remains unclear. This could be due to a lack of consensus onhow to describe and test the perceptuo-motor affordances thatmake an iconic word feel imitative to speakers. We created andanalyzed a database of 1,888 ideophones across 13 languages,and found that 5 articulatory properties, physiologically acces-sible to all spoken language users, pattern according to seman-tic features of ideophones. Our findings pave the way for futureresearch to utilize articulatory properties as a means to test andexplain how iconicity is encoded in spoken language.