English adverbial sentences allow flexible clause ordering: main-adverbial and adverbial-main, and their comprehension by English monolingual speakers is influenced by iconicity. Iconic sentences, whose clause order reflects the chronological sequence of real-world events, are more easily comprehended (“We ate dinner before we went to see a movie”; “After we ate dinner, we went to see a movie”) than non-iconic sentences where the order of the clauses does not match the order of events in the real world (“Before we went to see a movie, we ate dinner”; “We went to see a movie after we ate dinner”). However, Mandarin speakers strongly prefer the adverbial-main order in spontaneous Mandarin speech. This paper examines whether iconicity represents a generally preferred strategy for interpreting English adverbial sentences or whether a speaker’s first language affects processing. In two studies, we tested the comprehension of English before- and after-sentences by Mandarin-English bilingual and English monolingual adults, using online pupillometry with offline accuracy in a sentence-picture matching task. We found that bilinguals, like monolinguals, comprehended after-sentences in the iconic adverbial-main order (also the preferred order in Mandarin) more accurately and with less effort than in the reverse order. However, unlike monolinguals, bilinguals did not comprehend before-sentences better in either the iconic main-adverbial order or the preferred adverbial-main order for Mandarin. Our results suggest that iconicity is not universal; instead, language-specific usage patterns, such as preferred clause order, compete with iconicity to influence processing of adverbial sentences.

Minimal pairs have played an important role in documentation and theoretical work on signed and spoken languages. however, they have been difficult to find in emerging languages. This raises the question: Where and how can we expect minimal pairs to emerge, and under what conditions? In this paper, we analyze some of the first minimal pairs to emerge in Protactile Language (PT), a language found in DeafBlind communities where reciprocal, tactile communication practices have been in place for the last twenty years. We present two studies of data collected over twelve years to investigate the diachronic changes taking place in this language. We observe that: (i) the development of minimal pairs requires established, formal coherence in the system, and (ii) nearly all minimal pairs emerging in PT are within semantic classes, rather than across unrelated semantic classes. We argue that these contrasts are arising earlier because there is significant pragmatic pressure to distinguish between closely related meanings (e.g. dollar amounts and days of the week), and we show how iconicity catalyzes that process. In more established languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL), too much time has passed to know which contrasts came first, or what conditions enabled their emergence.

Face-to-face communication often involves multiple iconic cues (gestural, suprasegmental and segmental) to convey meaning. Previous research shows that gestural and suprasegmental iconicity cues, as well as gestural and segmental iconicity cues, often co-occur, suggesting that speakers combine visual and acoustic forms of iconicity to reinforce meaning. This study investigates whether listeners can simultaneously utilize both suprasegmental and segmental iconic cues in the same speech stimuli to associate sounds with meaning. Finnish-speaking participants were presented auditorily with pseudowords consisting of suprasegmental and segmental iconicity cues referring to shape-related concepts (Experiment 1) or magnitude-related concepts (Experiment 2). The study showed that these two dimensions of acoustic iconicity are processed relatively independently, yet in parallel, for linking the speech signal to meaning.

This study elicits iconicity ratings for Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) from L1 HKSL Deaf signers and L1 Cantonese hearing non-signers, as well as non-signer guessing accuracy, and compares these norms with other sign languages. Iconicity ratings were collected for 972 HKSL signs from Deaf signers and hearing non-signers and correlated with guesses made by hearing non-signers in three guessing paradigms, that is, three-alternative forced choice (3AFC) translation selection, 3AFC video selection and an open-ended (open cloze) response task. HKSL signs were rated for iconicity comparably to American Sign Language (ASL) and Israeli Sign Language (ISL), with Deaf signers rating signs with higher iconicity overall. We also correlated HKSL iconicity ratings across signs with synonymous translations from languages with available ratings, ASL (634 signs), ISL (158 signs) and British Sign Language (99 signs). Guessing accuracy was found to correlate with higher HKSL iconicity ratings. As for semantic transparency, 3AFC guessing results indicate that many signs are in fact ‘translucent’, whereby inference based on the context provided by answer choices allows hearing non-signers to select the target answer with high accuracy. Our open-ended guessing task yielded considerably lower accuracy; however, accurate responses (2,183 of 15,228) were found to correlate with higher iconicity ratings.

In this response to the target article by Law, Power, and Quinto-Pozos, which correctly points out that phonological change is a characteristic of both spoken and signed language, I note that we have more to learn from sign languages. Since sign languages are all very young in comparison to oral languages, linguists have an opportunity to observe phonological change as it occurs. Law et al. do not take into account the winding path of phonological change and the social and structural factors that influence this path. Conditions for such changes can be determined in part by the modality (oral or signed) in each type of language, as I discuss here.

We contend that attention to signed languages is crucial for a fuller understanding of the processes and mechanisms behind regular sound change in spoken languages. While the label ‘regular sound change’ would seem to limit the object of study to language change in the auditory-vocal channel, a typical assumption is that a visual-gestural modality correlate to regular sound change exists. At the same time, there exists a conflicting position that languages in nonauditory modalities, as they do not deal with sounds, are irrelevant to the study of sound change. These contradictory stances converge in their consequences, leading to the general practice in historical linguistics of not taking evidence from signed languages into account when developing theories of sound change. However, we argue that consideration of the affordances of the visual-gestural modality, and the distinctive aspects of language transmission and demographics in signing communities, is of particular value for refining the field’s understanding of the processes and constraints on regular sound change. Insights from signed languages push us to reframe the processes and mechanisms that lead to regular sound change and to broaden our understanding of why it happens. This has implications for a programmatic exploration of theories of regular sound change.

In response to Law et al.’s (2025) target article on signed language change, I discuss two aspects of regularity in sound change: the role of phonemes and the contribution of iconicity. Drawing on work on sound change in spoken languages, I set out some arguments for why linguistics needs to take proper account of signed language change, in order to better understand language dynamics in general. I further argue that signed ~ spoken language dichotomies or arguments from exceptionalism are unlikely to be as helpful as robust hypothesis testing.

This paper responds to commentaries by several authors on our target article, ‘Bringing signed languages into the study of regular sound change’ (Law et al. 2025a). We provide some additional context on the research program that spurred the target article and draw on several themes discussed in both the target article and commentaries, specifically (i) the affordances and effects of modality in (theories of) language change, (ii) iconicity (and indexicality), (iii) variation and irregularity in language change, and (iv) language transmission. We highlight the methodological advances afforded by new technologies to study phonetic variation in signed languages and advocate for increased attention to the systematic and comparative study of phonetic variation in signed languages as a window into processes of phonetic and phonological change in signed languages.

Some conceptual metaphors common in spoken languages are infelicitous in sign languages. The explanation suggested in this article is that the iconicity of these signs clashes with the shifts in meaning that take place in these metaphorical extensions. Both iconicity and metaphors are built on mappings of two domains: form and meaning in iconicity, source domain and target domain in metaphors. Iconic signs that undergo metaphoric extension are therefore subject to both mappings (Taub 2001). When the two mappings do not preserve the same structural correspondence, the metaphorical extension is blocked. This restriction is formulated as the double-mapping constraint, which requires multiple mappings to be structure-preserving. The effects of this constraint go beyond explaining possible and impossible metaphors in sign languages. Because of the central role of metaphors in various linguistic processes, constraints on their occurrence may affect other linguistic structures and processes that are built on these metaphors in both sign and spoken languages.

The sequential units of language (i.e. words) have often been characterized by a tension between diversity and universality in the triangulation between information content, length and frequency. Here we examine similar tensions in the sequential units of visual narratives (i.e. panels) by focusing on how many entities appear per panel in visual narratives from the TINTIN Corpus of 1,030 annotated comics from 144 countries (76,000+ panels). Rates of entities per panel differ in regularized ways between styles of comics that cut across global regions, implicating typologically different ‘visual languages’. Entities per panel were also associated with panel size, where greater numbers of entities were associated with larger sizes of panels. Finally, a negative association appeared between panels with different numbers of entities and their frequency, reminiscent of a Zipf’s law of abbreviation. As associations of both size and frequency with character per panel persisted in a uniform way across styles, it implies universal tendencies transcending the diversity across systems, consistent with typological properties of languages.

The structural focus of linguistics has led to a static and modular treatment of meaning. Viewing language as practice allows us to transcend the boundaries of subdisciplines that deal with meaning and to integrate the social indexicality of variation into this larger system. This article presents the expression of social meaning as a continuum of decreasing reference and increasing performativity, with sociolinguistic variation at the performative extreme. The meaning potential of sociolinguistic variables in turn is based in their form and their social source, constituting a cline of ‘interiority’ from variables that index public social facts about the speaker to more internal, personal affective states.

Sound symbolism is a phenomenon with broad relevance to the study of language and mind, but there has been a disconnect between its investigations in linguistics and psychology. This study tests the sound-symbolic potential of ideophones—words described as iconic—in an experimental task that improves over prior work in terms of ecological validity and experimental control. We presented 203 ideophones from five languages to eighty-two Dutch listeners in a binary-choice task, in four versions: original recording, full diphone resynthesis, segments-only resynthesis, and prosody-only resynthesis. Listeners guessed the meaning of all four versions above chance, confirming the iconicity of ideophones and showing the viability of speech synthesis as a way of controlling for segmental and suprasegmental properties in experimental studies of sound symbolism. The success rate was more modest than prior studies using pseudowords like bouba/kiki, implying that assumptions based on such words cannot simply be transferred to natural languages. Prosody and segments together drive the effect: neither alone is sufficient, showing that segments and prosody work together as cues supporting iconic interpretations. The findings cast doubt on attempts to ascribe iconic meanings to segments alone and support a view of ideophones as words that combine arbitrariness and iconicity. We discuss the implications for theory and methods in the empirical study of sound symbolism and iconicity.

Typologically, the world's languages vary in how they express universal quantification and negative quantification. In patterns of concord, a single distributive or negative meaning is expressed redundantly on multiple morphological items. Sign languages, too, show semantic variation, but, surprisingly, this variation populates a specific corner of the full typological landscape. When we focus on manual signs, sign languages systematically have distributive concord but tend to not have negative concord in its canonical form. Here, I explain these typological facts as the reflection of an abstract, iconic bias. Recent work on distributive concord and negative concord has proposed that the phenomena can be explained in relation to the discourse referents they make available. The use of space in sign language also invites iconic inferences about the referents introduced in discourse. I show that these iconic inferences coincide with the meaning of distributive concord but contradict the meaning of negative concord. The sign language typology is thus explained based on what is easy and hard to represent in space.

This article studies the relationship between prosody and desemanticization in grammaticalization processes by means of a well-described phenomenon, the grammaticalization of ‘type’ nouns (type, kind, sort) in present-day English. To this end, 1,155 tokens of the three nouns, retrieved from the ICE-GB corpus, were semantically classified and prosodically analyzed. Our main result is that different synchronically coexisting prosodic patterns correspond to different degrees of grammaticalization. This result provides evidence that desemanticization and erosion proceed hand in hand. Their parallel development is attributed to the demands of iconicity rather than to frequency effects.

Prosody not only signals the speaker’s cognitive states but can also imitate various concepts. However, previous studies on the latter, the iconic function of prosody, have mostly analyzed novel words and nonlinguistic vocalizations. To fill this gap in the literature, the current study has examined the iconic potential of the prosodic features of existing Japanese imitative words known as ideophones. In Experiment 1, female Japanese speakers pronounced 20 sentences containing ideophones in infant-directed speech. They used a higher f0 to express faster and more pleasant movements. Similar iconic associations were observed in Experiment 2, in which Japanese speakers chose the best-matching pitch–intensity–duration combination for each of the ideophones. In Experiment 3, Japanese speakers chose the best-matching voice quality – creaky voice, falsetto, harsh voice or whisper – for the ideophones. Falsetto was preferred for a light object’s fast motion, harsh voice for violent motion and whisper for quiet motion. Based on these results, we entertain the possibility that the iconic prosody of ideophones provides a missing link in the evolutionary theory of language that began with iconic vocalizations. Ideophones with varying degrees of iconic prosody can be considered to be located between nonlinguistic vocalizations and arbitrary words in this evolutionary path.

We investigated how the presence of linguistic labels, their iconicity and mode of presentation (cued vs not cued) affect non-linguistic cognitive processing, focussing on the learning and visual discrimination of new categories. Novel species of aliens that mimicked natural categories were paired with iconic labels, non-iconic labels or no labels across two tasks. In the Training task participants learnt to categorise the aliens, with results showing that both labels and iconicity improved categorisation. We then used a Match to Sample task to test how these variables affect rapid visual discrimination. Results showed that the presence of labels, their iconicity and label cueing all lead to more rapid and accurate visual discrimination of newly acquired categories. We argue that this is due to iconicity exaggerating sensory expectations provided by linguistic labels, made more readily accessible by cueing. We also examine the possible implications of our results for the discussion about language evolution.