Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A foundational assumption in linguistics has been that words and their meanings are arbitrarily related; however, thisposition has been challenged recently. Experiments have shown that both systematic (where similar objects have similar labels)and iconic (words ‘resemble’ the objects they label) associations between words and objects facilitate learning. However, thesetwo literatures remain confounded: the degree to which increased learnability is driven by iconicity rather than systematicityhas not been disentangled. Here we present the results of two studies testing the differences in learnability between artificiallexica that are either conventionally systematic, or both systematic and cross-modally iconic. In the first study we find that bothconventional and iconic systematic lexicons are equally learnable, but iconic mappings provide an early learnability advantage.In the second study we find that the presence of sound-symbolic associations for one dimension can interfere with the learningof conventional associations on another dimension.