Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-14-2025
Abstract
The view that words are arbitrary is a foundational assumption about language, used to set human languages apart from nonhuman communication. We present here a study of the alignment between the semantic and phonological structure (systematicity) of American Sign Language (ASL), and for comparison, two spoken languages—English and Spanish. Across all three languages, words that are semantically related are more likely to be phonologically related, highlighting systematic alignment between word form and word meaning. Critically, there is a significant effect of iconicity (a perceived physical resemblance between word form and word meaning) on this alignment: words are most likely to be phonologically related when they are semantically related and iconic. This phenomenon is particularly widespread in ASL: half of the signs in the ASL lexicon are iconically related to other signs, i.e., there is a nonarbitrary relationship between form and meaning that is shared across signs. Taken together, the results reveal that iconicity can act as a driving force behind the alignment between the semantic and phonological structure of spoken and signed languages, but languages may differ in the extent that iconicity structures the lexicon. Theories of language must account for iconicity as a possible organizing principle of the lexicon.
Recommended Citation
E.E. Campbell, Z.S. Sehyr, E. Pontecorvo, A. Cohen-Goldberg, K. Emmorey, & N. Caselli, Iconicity as an organizing principle of the lexicon, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (16) e2401041122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2401041122 (2025).
Appendix 01
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The authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Included in
American Sign Language Commons, Comparative and Historical Linguistics Commons, Other Linguistics Commons, Phonetics and Phonology Commons, Semantics and Pragmatics Commons, Spanish Linguistics Commons
Comments
This article was originally published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A., volume 122, issue 16, in 2025. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2401041122