Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Research suggests that the meanings of iconic signs are not easily guessable by sign-naive people; however, some signs' meanings are more easily guessed than others'. What causes some signs to be more easily guessable (more transparent) than others is not well-understood. In our previous research, we showed that signs whose form is based on more cross-linguistically common underlying motivations were chosen as "better suited" to a meaning—that is, they are more transparent—than signs based on less common underlying motivations (Tkachman, Sadlier-Brown, Lo, & Hudson Kam, 2023). In the current study, we ask whether, in addition, iconicity affects a sign's transparency. We asked sign-naive English speakers to rate all the signs from our previous study for how iconic they are. We then reanalyzed the data from our previous study in light of the obtained iconicity ratings. Results show that when people are asked to choose between an attested sign for a given animal label and an unattested one (i.e., a sign for a different animal), iconicity ratings did not affect participants' preferences: attested signs are preferred regardless of how iconic they are. However, when participants are asked to choose between two attested signs with the same meaning (e.g., two signs for 'cat' from different sign languages), iconicity does appear to affect participants' choices: participants were more likely to pick the more cross-linguistically common sign if the difference in iconicity ratings between the two signs was bigger. These results shed additional light on the ongoing debate on the connection between iconicity and transparency: iconicity by itself does not make a sign transparent, but it can enhance transparency under certain conditions.