In:Dimensions of Iconicity
Edited by Angelika Zirker, Matthias Bauer, Olga Fischer and Christina Ljungberg
[Iconicity in Language and Literature 15] 2017
► pp. 3–14
The effect of iconicity flash blindness
An empirical study
Published online: 8 September 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/ill.15.01dia
https://doi.org/10.1075/ill.15.01dia
In our experiment, the Saussurean postulate of arbitrariness has been empirically tested in order to see whether it can be applied to all words to the same extent. Three hundred participants were asked to match Czech words with their Hindi translations. One set of words was randomly chosen from a Hindi corpus (set A); the second set consisted of both randomly chosen words and words categorized as ideophones (set B). The participants were successful in matching both sets (the lower level of the confidence interval is about 7% above random guessing), and their performance showed unexpected patterns: For one, not only iconic properties (the sound qualities) but also iconic structures such as reduplication are an important distinctive features, and recipients are able to exploit this. Moreover, even words considered to be non-iconic (set A) apparently contain a degree of iconicity, which participants are able to draw upon. However, participants appear to lose this ability when non-iconic words are presented in the context of words with evidently abundant iconicity (set B). The effect resembles the accommodation process which is known for other senses; therefore, we call the effect “Iconicity flash blindness”.
Article outline
- 1.Background
- 2.Data
- 3.Participants
- 4.Experiment
- 5.Hypotheses
- 5.1Hypothesis 1
- 5.2Hypothesis 2
- 6.Results
- 6.1Results 1: Our hypotheses
- 6.2Results 2: Unexpected patterns
- 7.Conclusion
Acknowledgments Notes References
References (11)
Ahlner, F. & Zlatev, J. 2010. Cross-modal iconicity: A cognitive semiotic approach to sound symbolism. Sign Systems Studies 38(1): 298–348.
Bojar, O., Diatka, V., Rychlý, P., Straňák, P., Suchomel, V., Tamchyna, A. & Zeman, D. 2014. HindEnCorp – Hindi-English and Hindi-only corpus for machine translation. LREC 2014: 3550–3555.
Brackbill, Y. & Little, K. B. 1957. Factors determining guessing of meaning of foreign words. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 54(3): 312–318.
Ciccotosto, N. 1991. Sound Symbolism in Natural Languages. PhD dissertation, University of Florida.
Dingemanse, M. 2011. The Meaning and Use of Ideophones in Siwu. PhD dissertation, Radbound University Nijmegen. 〈[URL]〉 (12 December 2016).
Diatka, V. 2014. Hindi Ideophones. MA thesis, Charles University in Prague. 〈[URL]〉 (12 December 2016).
Milička, J. & Diatka, V. Forthcoming. Mutual intelligibility of mutually unintelligible languages: How great is the effect of iconicity and distant kinship? Ms submitted for publication.
Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Marklová, Anna, Jiří Milička, Leonid Ryvkin, L’udmila Lacková Bennet & Libuše Kormaníková
Milička, Jiří, Anna Marklová, Michal Láznička, Vojtěch Diatka, Hana Bednářová, Jiří Matela & Michal Škrabal
Lacková, Ľudmila
Krivochen, Diego Gabriel & Ľudmila Lacková
2020. Iconicity in syntax and the architecture of linguistic theory. Studies in Language 44:1 ► pp. 95 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.