People Can Create Iconic Vocalizations to Communicate Various Meanings to Naive Listeners.

ABSTRACT: The innovation of iconic gestures is essential to establishing the vocabularies of signed languages, but might iconicity also play a role in the origin of spoken words? Can people create novel vocalizations that are comprehensible to naïve listeners without prior convention? We launched a contest in which participants submitted non-linguistic vocalizations for 30 meanings spanning actions, humans, animals, inanimate objects, properties, quantifiers and demonstratives. The winner was determined by the ability of naïve listeners to infer the meanings of the vocalizations. We report a series of experiments and analyses that evaluated the vocalizations for: (1) comprehensibility to naïve listeners; (2) the degree to which they were iconic; (3) agreement between producers and listeners in iconi

SUBMITTER: Perlman M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5805706 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature