Iconic hand gestures from ideophones exhibit stability and emergent phonological properties

An iterated learning study

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12197446
AutoresA H Thompson (0000-0002-1508-1232, Department of Linguistics , 25809 The University of Hong Kong , Hong Kong , China, autor de correspondencia), Thomas Van Hoey (0000-0002-5226-9752, FWO & QLVL , KU Leuven , Leuven , Belgium), Aaron Wing Cheung Chik (0009-0002-9740-5380, Department of Linguistics , 25809 The University of Hong Kong , Hong Kong , China), Youngah Do (0000-0002-9348-0351, Department of Linguistics , 25809 The University of Hong Kong , Hong Kong , China)
Año2025
Volumen36
Número2
Páginas227-259
Fecha de publicación2025-04-29
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaCognitive Linguistics (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0936-5907 • E-ISSN: 1613-3641
EditorialDe Gruyter Mouton (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/cog-2024-0033
OpenAlexW4409957154
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas68

Ideophones are marked words which depict sensory imagery and are usually considered iconic by native speakers (i.e., ideophones sound like what they mean). Owing to shared cross-linguistic characteristics of expressive prosody, reduplication, and unusual phonological structure, ideophones have been likened to meaning performed. Iconic hand gestures frequently occur alongside ideophones choreographed to the timing of syllables. Given the visual modality’s richness in iconic affordances, these gestures have been supposed to help interlocutors infer semantic nuances and contextualize utterances, especially when an ideophone is polysemous, and may even inform speakers’ mental representations of spoken language as imitative. Such gestures should therefore be learnable and replicable like any unit of language. This is what we indeed find. Using a linear iterated learning paradigm, we investigated the stability of iconic gestures from Japanese and Korean ideophones transmitted across five generations. Despite noise in the visual signal, participants’ hand gestures converged, speaking to the emergence of phonological targets. Handshape configurations over time exhibited finger coordination reminiscent of unmarked handshapes observed in phonological inventories of signed languages. Well-replicated gestures were correlated with well-guessed ideophones from a spoken language study, further highlighting the complementary nature of the visual and spoken modalities in formulating mental representations

Cognitive psychology · Gesture · Linguistics · Phonology · Communication · Hearing Impairment and Communication · Language and cultural evolution · Multisensory perception and integration · Philosophy · Psychology