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Article published In: Interaction and Iconicity in the Evolution of Language:
Edited by Stefan Hartmann, Michael Pleyer, James Winters and Jordan Zlatev
[Interaction Studies 18:3] 2017
► pp. 443–464

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Which words are most iconic?

Iconicity in English sensory words

 | University of Birmingham |
|
 | University of Miami |
 | University of Wisconsin-Madison |
Published online: 8 December 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/is.18.3.07win
Some spoken words are iconic, exhibiting a resemblance between form and meaning. We used native speaker ratings to assess the iconicity of 3001 English words, analyzing their iconicity in relation to part-of-speech differences and differences between the sensory domain they relate to (sight, sound, touch, taste and smell). First, we replicated previous findings showing that onomatopoeia and interjections were highest in iconicity, followed by verbs and adjectives, and then nouns and grammatical words. We further show that words with meanings related to the senses are more iconic than words with abstract meanings. Moreover, iconicity is not distributed equally across sensory modalities: Auditory and tactile words tend to be more iconic than words denoting concepts related to taste, smell and sight. Last, we examined the relationship between iconicity (resemblance between form and meaning) and systematicity (statistical regularity between form and meaning). We find that iconicity in English words is more strongly related to sensory meanings than systematicity. Altogether, our results shed light on the extent and distribution of iconicity in modern English.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Iconicity and the senses
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Variables
    • 2.2Analyses
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Replication and extension of Perry et al. (2015)
    • 3.2Systematicity and iconicity
    • 3.3Sensory meanings and iconicity
    • 3.4Modality differences in iconicity
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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Campbell, Erin E. & Elika Bergelson
2022. Making sense of sensory language: Acquisition of sensory knowledge by individuals with congenital sensory impairments. Neuropsychologia 174 ► pp. 108320 ff. DOI logo
Conrad, M., S. Ullrich, D. Schmidtke & S.A. Kotz
2022. ERPs reveal an iconic relation between sublexical phonology and affective meaning. Cognition 226 ► pp. 105182 ff. DOI logo
de Varda, Andrea Gregor & Carlo Strapparava
2022. A Cross‐Modal and Cross‐lingual Study of Iconicity in Language: Insights From Deep Learning. Cognitive Science 46:6 DOI logo
Engelen, Jan A. A.
2022. The In‐Out Effect in the Perception and Production of Real Words. Cognitive Science 46:9 DOI logo
Fuks, Orit
2022. Infants’ Use of Iconicity in the Early Periods of Sign/Spoken Word-Learning. The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 28:1 ► pp. 21 ff. DOI logo
Fuks, Orit
2025. Sign Duration in Infant-Directed Signing: Evidence from Deaf Mother–Hearing Infant Dyads in Israeli Sign Language. First Language DOI logo
Gappmayr, Paris, Amy M. Lieberman, Jennie Pyers & Naomi K. Caselli
2022. Do parents modify child-directed signing to emphasize iconicity?. Frontiers in Psychology 13 DOI logo
Haslett, David A. & Zhenguang G. Cai
2022. New neighbours make bad fences: Form-based semantic shifts in word learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 29:3 ► pp. 1017 ff. DOI logo
Haslett, David A. & Zhenguang G. Cai
2024. Wayward associations: When and why people think of similar-sounding words. Journal of Memory and Language 138 ► pp. 104537 ff. DOI logo
Haslett, David A. & Zhenguang G. Cai
2024. Systematic mappings of sound to meaning: A theoretical review. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 31:2 ► pp. 627 ff. DOI logo
Hodge, Gabrielle & Lindsay Ferrara
2022. Iconicity as Multimodal, Polysemiotic, and Plurifunctional. Frontiers in Psychology 13 DOI logo
Lavitskaya, Yulia, Yulia Sedelkina, Elizaveta Korotaevskaya, Liubov Tkacheva, Maria Flaksman & Andrey Nasledov
2022. Does De-Iconization Affect Visual Recognition of Russian and English Iconic Words?. Languages 7:2 ► pp. 97 ff. DOI logo
Margiotoudi, Konstantina, Manuel Bohn, Natalie Schwob, Jared Taglialatela, Friedemann Pulvermüller, Amanda Epping, Ken Schweller & Matthias Allritz
2022. Bo-NO-bouba-kiki: picture-word mapping but no spontaneous sound symbolic speech-shape mapping in a language trained bonobo. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 289:1968 DOI logo
Muraki, Emiko J., Summer Abdalla, Marc Brysbaert & Penny M. Pexman
2022. Concreteness ratings for 62,000 English multiword expressions. Behavior Research Methods 55:5 ► pp. 2522 ff. DOI logo
Rodriguez-Cuadrado, Sara, José Antonio Hinojosa, Marc Guasch, Carlos Romero-Rivas, Lucía Sabater, Paz Suárez-Coalla & Pilar Ferré
2022. Subjective age of acquisition norms for 1604 English words by Spanish L2 speakers of English and their relationship with lexico-semantic, affective, sociolinguistic and proficiency variables. Behavior Research Methods 55:8 ► pp. 4437 ff. DOI logo
Shapiro, Mary
2022. Hidden Gems Unexpectedly Poetic Lines Easily Overlooked (?) in Infinite Jest’s Voluminous Flow. English Literature :1 DOI logo
Winter, Bodo, Márton Sóskuthy, Marcus Perlman & Mark Dingemanse
2022. Trilled /r/ is associated with roughness, linking sound and touch across spoken languages. Scientific Reports 12:1 DOI logo
Hinojosa, J. A., J. Haro, S. Magallares, J. A. Duñabeitia & P. Ferré
2021. Iconicity ratings for 10,995 Spanish words and their relationship with psycholinguistic variables. Behavior Research Methods 53:3 ► pp. 1262 ff. DOI logo
McLean, Bonnie
2021. Revising an implicational hierarchy for the meanings of ideophones, with special reference to Japonic. Linguistic Typology 25:3 ► pp. 507 ff. DOI logo
Mon, Serena K., Mira Nencheva, Francesca M.M. Citron, Casey Lew-Williams & Adele E. Goldberg
2021. Conventional metaphors elicit greater real-time engagement than literal paraphrases or concrete sentences. Journal of Memory and Language 121 ► pp. 104285 ff. DOI logo
Monaghan, Padraic & Seán G. Roberts
2021. Iconicity and Diachronic Language Change. Cognitive Science 45:4 DOI logo
Perry, Lynn K., Stephanie A. Custode, Regina M. Fasano, Brittney M. Gonzalez & Jordyn D. Savy
2021. What Is the Buzz About Iconicity? How Iconicity in Caregiver Speech Supports Children's Word Learning. Cognitive Science 45:4 DOI logo
Sidhu, David M., Chris Westbury, Geoff Hollis & Penny M. Pexman
2021. Sound symbolism shapes the English language: The maluma/takete effect in English nouns. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 28:4 ► pp. 1390 ff. DOI logo
Winter, Bodo & Marcus Perlman
2021. Size sound symbolism in the English lexicon. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 6:1 DOI logo
Winter, Bodo & Marcus Perlman
2021. Iconicity ratings really do measure iconicity, and they open a new window onto the nature of language. Linguistics Vanguard 7:1 DOI logo
CABALLERO, ROSARIO & CARITA PARADIS
2020. Soundscapes in English and Spanish: a corpus investigation of verb constructions. Language and Cognition 12:4 ► pp. 705 ff. DOI logo
Lynott, Dermot, Louise Connell, Marc Brysbaert, James Brand & James Carney
2020. The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms: multidimensional measures of perceptual and action strength for 40,000 English words. Behavior Research Methods 52:3 ► pp. 1271 ff. DOI logo
Novogrodsky, Rama & Natalia Meir
2020. Age, frequency, and iconicity in early sign language acquisition: Evidence from the Israeli Sign Language MacArthur–Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory. Applied Psycholinguistics 41:4 ► pp. 817 ff. DOI logo
SIDHU, DAVID M., GABRIELLA VIGLIOCCO & PENNY M. PEXMAN
2020. Effects of iconicity in lexical decision. Language and Cognition 12:1 ► pp. 164 ff. DOI logo
Speed, Laura J. & Asifa Majid
2020. Grounding language in the neglected senses of touch, taste, and smell. Cognitive Neuropsychology 37:5-6 ► pp. 363 ff. DOI logo
Thompson, Arthur Lewis, Kimi Akita & Youngah Do
2020. Iconicity ratings across the Japanese lexicon: A comparative study with English. Linguistics Vanguard 6:1 DOI logo
THOMPSON, BILL, MARCUS PERLMAN, GARY LUPYAN, ZED SEVCIKOVA SEHYR & KAREN EMMOREY
2020. A data-driven approach to the semantics of iconicity in American Sign Language and English. Language and Cognition 12:1 ► pp. 182 ff. DOI logo
Vergallito, Alessandra, Marco Alessandro Petilli & Marco Marelli
2020. Perceptual modality norms for 1,121 Italian words: A comparison with concreteness and imageability scores and an analysis of their impact in word processing tasks. Behavior Research Methods 52:4 ► pp. 1599 ff. DOI logo
Laing, Catherine E.
2019. Phonological Motivation for the Acquisition of Onomatopoeia: An Analysis of Early Words. Language Learning and Development 15:2 ► pp. 177 ff. DOI logo
Pexman, Penny M., Emiko Muraki, David M. Sidhu, Paul D. Siakaluk & Melvin J. Yap
2019. Quantifying sensorimotor experience: Body–object interaction ratings for more than 9,000 English words. Behavior Research Methods 51:2 ► pp. 453 ff. DOI logo
Slavova, Velina
2019. Towards emotion recognition in texts: A sound-symbolic experiment. International Journal of Cognitive Research in Science Engineering and Education 7:2 ► pp. 41 ff. DOI logo
Slavova, Velina
2020. Emotional Valence Coded in the Phonemic Content – Statistical Evidence Based on Corpus Analysis. Cybernetics and Information Technologies 20:2 ► pp. 3 ff. DOI logo
Thompson, Arthur Lewis & Youngah Do
2019. Defining iconicity: An articulation-based methodology for explaining the phonological structure of ideophones. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4:1 DOI logo
Winter, Bodo, Paula Pérez-Sobrino, Lucien Brown & Andriy Myachykov
2019. The sound of soft alcohol: Crossmodal associations between interjections and liquor. PLOS ONE 14:8 ► pp. e0220449 ff. DOI logo
Dingemanse, Mark
2018. Redrawing the margins of language: Lessons from research on ideophones. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3:1 DOI logo
Lupyan, Gary & Bodo Winter
2018. Language is more abstract than you think, or, why aren't languages more iconic?. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 373:1752 ► pp. 20170137 ff. DOI logo
Ota, Mitsuhiko, Nicola Davies‐Jenkins & Barbora Skarabela
2018. Why Choo‐Choo Is Better Than Train: The Role of Register‐Specific Words in Early Vocabulary Growth. Cognitive Science 42:6 ► pp. 1974 ff. DOI logo
Perlman, Marcus & Gary Lupyan
2018. People Can Create Iconic Vocalizations to Communicate Various Meanings to Naïve Listeners. Scientific Reports 8:1 DOI logo
Sidhu, David M. & Penny M. Pexman
2018. Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 25:5 ► pp. 1619 ff. DOI logo
Sidhu, David M. & Penny M. Pexman
2021. Implications of the “Language as Situated” View for Written Iconicity. Journal of Cognition 4:1 DOI logo
Strik Lievers, Francesca & Bodo Winter
2018. Sensory language across lexical categories. Lingua 204 ► pp. 45 ff. DOI logo
Östling, Robert, Carl Börstell & Servane Courtaux
2018. Visual Iconicity Across Sign Languages: Large-Scale Automated Video Analysis of Iconic Articulators and Locations. Frontiers in Psychology 9 DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2019. Sensory Linguistics [Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research, 20], DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2019. Conclusion. In Sensory Linguistics [Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research, 20], ► pp. 235 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2022. Sound–Emotion Interaction in Poetry [Linguistic Approaches to Literature, 39], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 17 march 2026. 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.

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