Onomatopoeia appear in high quantities in many infants’ earliest words, yet there is minimal research in this area. Instead, findings from the wider iconicity literature are generalised to include onomatopoeia, leading to the assumption that their iconic status makes them inherently learnable, thereby prompting their early production. In this review we bring together the literature on onomatopoeia specifically and iconicity more generally to consider infants’ acquisition from three perspectives: perception, production, and interaction. We consider these findings in relation to Imai and Kita’s (2014) ‘sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis’ to determine whether their framework can account for onomatopoeia alongside other iconic forms.

Growing evidence from across the cognitive sciences indicates that iconicity plays an important role in a number of fundamental language processes, spanning learning, comprehension, and online use. One benefit of this recent upsurge in empirical work is the diversification of methods available for measuring iconicity. In this paper, we provide an overview of methods in the form of a ‘toolbox’. We lay out empirical methods for measuring iconicity at a behavioural level, in the perception, production, and comprehension of iconic forms. We also discuss large-scale studies that look at iconicity on a system-wide level, based on objective measures of similarity between signals and meanings. We give a detailed overview of how different measures of iconicity can better address specific hypotheses, providing greater clarity when choosing testing methods.

Iconicity is often defined as the resemblance between a form and a given meaning, while transparency is defined as the ability to infer a given meaning based on the form. This study examined the influence of knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL) on the perceived iconicity of signs and the relationship between iconicity, transparency (correctly guessed signs), ‘perceived transparency’ (transparency ratings of the guesses), and ‘semantic potential’ (the diversity (H index) of guesses). Experiment 1 compared iconicity ratings by deaf ASL signers and hearing non-signers for 991 signs from the ASL-LEX database. Signers and non-signers’ ratings were highly correlated; however, the groups provided different iconicity ratings for subclasses of signs: nouns vs. verbs, handling vs. entity, and one- vs. two-handed signs. In Experiment 2, non-signers guessed the meaning of 430 signs and rated them for how transparent their guessed meaning would be for others. Only 10% of guesses were correct. Iconicity ratings correlated with transparency (correct guesses), perceived transparency ratings, and semantic potential (H index). Further, some iconic signs were perceived as non-transparent and vice versa. The study demonstrates that linguistic knowledge mediates perceived iconicity distinctly from gesture and highlights critical distinctions between iconicity, transparency (perceived and objective), and semantic potential.

The sound of words has been shown to relate to the meaning that the words denote, an effect that extends beyond morphological properties of the word. Studies of these sound-symbolic relations have described this iconicity in terms of individual phonemes, or alternatively due to acoustic properties (expressed in phonological features) relating to meaning. In this study, we investigated whether individual phonemes or phoneme features best accounted for iconicity effects. We tested 92 participants’ judgements about the appropriateness of 320 nonwords presented in written form, relating to 8 different semantic attributes. For all 8 attributes, individual phonemes fitted participants’ responses better than general phoneme features. These results challenge claims that sound-symbolic effects for visually presented words can access broad, cross-modal associations between sound and meaning, instead the results indicate the operation of individual phoneme to meaning relations. Whether similar effects are found for nonwords presented auditorially remains an open question.

The languages of the world differ in their use of intrinsic, relative, and absolute reference frames to describe spatial relationships, but factors guiding reference frame choices are not yet well understood. This paper addresses the role of animacy and linguistic construction in reference frame choices in English and Spanish. During each trial of two experiments, adult participants saw a spatial scene along with a sentence describing the location of an object (locatum) relative to another object (relatum) that was animate or human(-like) to varying degrees. The scene presented two possible referents for the locatum, and participants decided which referent the description referred to, revealing which reference frame they used to interpret the sentence. Results showed that reference frame choices differed systematically between languages. In English, the non-possessive construction (X is to the left of Y) was consistently associated with the relative reference frame, and the possessive construction (X is on Y’s left) was associated with the intrinsic reference frame. In Spanish, the intrinsic interpretation was dominant throughout, except for the non-possessive construction with relata that were not anthropomorphic, animate, or human. We discuss the results with respect to the languages’ syntactic repertory, and the notion of inalienable possession.

We spend much of our time consuming stories across different types of media, often becoming deeply engaged or transported into these stories. However, there has been almost no research into whether processing a story in one’s non-native language influences our level of transportation. We analyzed three existing datasets in order to compare engagement with English-language stories for those who reported English as their first language and those who reported English as their second language. Stories were presented as text (Study 1), audio (Study 2), and short films (Study 3). Across all studies, equivalent levels of narrative transportation between language groups were found, even after accounting for age and years of English fluency. These results are in contrast to some previous proposals that emotional reactions are attenuated during non-native language processing, despite equivalent levels of comprehension. Our evidence indicates that individuals processing a narrative in their second language feel just as transported into the story as those processing the same narrative in their native language.

Buddhist and Hindu discourse often juxtapose statements about the inexpressibility of ultimate reality with descriptions drawing on metaphor and paradox. This raises the question of how particular types of metaphor fulfill the role of expressing what is believed to be inexpressible. The current study employs a cognitive linguistic framework to examine how modern Buddhist and Hindu religious teachers use metaphor to talk about enlightenment. Adopting a usage-based approach focusing on how figurative language is recontexualized by the same speaker within a stretch of discourse, the study identifies a recurrent pattern within the discourse on enlightenment that consists of four elements. The first is source domain reversal, which we define as a speaker making use of a particular source domain to refer to a target, and then later, in the same discourse segment, using a source domain with a seemingly opposite meaning to refer to the same target. The other three involve a movement from force to object-based schemas, from the perceived revelation of more conventional to deeper truths, and from description of a process to description of a state. We conclude by briefly discussing our findings within the context of research on apophatic discourse in other religions.