Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Sign languages stand out in that there is high prevalence ofconventionalised linguistic forms that map directly to theirreferent (i.e., iconic). Hearing adults show low performancewhen asked to guess the meaning of iconic signs suggestingthat their iconic features are largely inaccessible to them.However, it has not been investigated whether speakers’gestures, which also share the property of iconicity, mayassist non-signers in guessing the meaning of signs. Resultsfrom a pantomime generation task (Study 1) show thatspeakers’ gestures exhibit a high degree of systematicity, andshare different degrees of form overlap with signs (full,partial, and no overlap). Study 2 shows that signs with fulland partial overlap are more accurately guessed and areassigned higher iconicity ratings than signs with no overlap.Deaf and hearing adults converge in their iconic depictionsfor some concepts due to the shared conceptual knowledgeand manual-visual modality.