Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Iconicity, i.e. resemblance between form and meaning, is awidespread feature of natural language vocabulary (Perniss,Thompson, & Vigliocco, 2010), and has been shown tofacilitate vocabulary acquisition (Imai, Kita, Nagumo, &Okada). But what kind of advantage does iconicity actuallygive? Here we use cross-situational learning (Yu & Smith,2007), to address the question for sound-shape iconicity (theso-called kiki-bouba effect, Ramachandran & Hubbard,2001). In contrast to Monaghan, Mattock, and Walker (2012),Experiment 1 suggests that the iconicity advantage comesfrom referential disambiguation rather than more efficientmemory encoding. Experiments 2 and 3 replicate this result,and moreover show that the kiki-bouba effect is roughlyequally strong for sharp and rounded shapes, a property thatclassic experiments were unable to confirm, and which hasimplication for the effect’s mechanism