Iconicity ratings for 10,995 Spanish words and their relationship with psycholinguistic variables
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Iconicity ratings for 10,995 Spanish words and their relationship with psycholinguistic variables J. A. Hinojosa 1,2,3 & J. Haro 4 & S. Magallares 1 & J. A. Duñabeitia 3,5 & P. Ferré 4 Accepted: 30 September 2020 # The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract The study of iconicity, or the resemblance between word forms and their meanings, has been the focus of increasing attention in recent years. Nevertheless, there is a lack of large-scale normative studies on the iconic properties of words, which could prove crucial to expanding our understanding of form–meaning associations. In this work, we report subjective iconicity ratings for 10,995 visually presented Spanish words from 1350 participants who were asked to repeat each of the words aloud before rating them. The response reliability and the consistency between the present and previous ratings were good. The relationships between iconicity and several psycholinguistic variables were examined through multiple regression analyses. We found that sensory experience ratings were the main predictor of iconicity, and that early-acquired and more abstract words received higher iconicity scores. We also found that onomatopoeias and interjections were the most iconic words, followed by adjectives. Finally, a follow-up study was conducted in which a subsample of 360 words with different levels of iconicity from the visual presentation study was auditorily presented to the participants. A high correlation was observed between the iconicity scores in the visual and auditory presentations. The normative data provided in this database might prove useful in expanding the body of knowledge on issues such as the processing of the iconic properties of words and the role of word-form associations in the acquisition of vocabularies. The database can be downloaded from https://osf.io/v5er3/. Keywords Iconicity . Sound-symbolism . Concreteness . SERs . Subjective AoA
Introduction The debate surrounding the relationship between the sound and the meaning of words has a long historical tradition going back to early antiquity. In the work On Interpretation, Aristotle outlined his concept of a linguistic sign as an arbitrary convention between sounds and meanings. This idea
* J. A. Hinojosa [email protected] 1
Instituto Pluridisciplinar, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Paseo Juan XXIII, 1, 28040 Madrid, Spain
2
Dpto. Psicología Experimental, Procesos Cognitivos y Logopedia, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
3
Centro de Ciencia Cognitiva - C3, Universidad Nebrija, Madrid, Spain
4
Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Department of Psychology and CRAMC, Tarragona, Spain
5
Department of Languages and Culture, The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway
became dogmatic when one of the founders of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, established that a central property of natural language is the capacity of linguistic symbols to combine into limitless conventional forms of the sign. Thus, arbitrariness would allow unlimited possibilities for communication and ex
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