Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Iconicity is a central notion in cognitive science, attracting growing attention from perspectives on language acquisition, processing, and language evolution. While previous research has emphasized the subjective nature of iconicity, quantitative analyses of iconicity ratings have relied primarily on mean values, treating iconicity as a stable lexical property, and have often been constrained by substantial data loss when integrating multiple lexical and psycholinguistic datasets. The present study addresses these limitations by analyzing both mean iconicity ratings and inter-rater variability across 14,764 English words, combining a conservative complete-case analysis with complementary analyses based on imputed predictors to increase lexical coverage. For example, in the complete-case analysis, earlier-acquired and etymologically imitative words tended to receive higher mean iconicity ratings, whereas rating variability was greater for earlier-acquired and more familiar words. By examining both mean ratings and variability, we distinguish factors associated with perceived iconicity from those associated with convergence or divergence in iconicity judgments, offering a broader account of lexical iconicity and heterogeneity in iconic perception.