Iconicity can ground the creation of vocal symbols.

Marcus Perlman,Gary Lupyan,Rick Dale

doi:10.1098/rsos.150152

Abstract

Studies of gestural communication systems find that they originate from spontaneously created iconic gestures. Yet, we know little about how people create vocal communication systems, and many have suggested that vocalizations do not afford iconicity beyond trivial instances of onomatopoeia. It is unknown whether people can generate vocal communication systems through a process of iconic creation similar to gestural systems. Here, we examine the creation and development of a rudimentary vocal symbol system in a laboratory setting. Pairs of participants generated novel vocalizations for 18 different meanings in an iterative ‘vocal’ charades communication game. The communicators quickly converged on stable vocalizations, and naive listeners could correctly infer their meanings in subsequent playback experiments. People's ability to guess the meanings of these novel vocalizations was predicted by how close the vocalization was to an iconic ‘meaning template’ we derived from the production data. These results strongly suggest that the meaningfulness of these vocalizations derived from iconicity. Our findings illuminate a mechanism by which iconicity can ground the creation of vocal symbols, analogous to the function of iconicity in gestural communication systems.

Highlights

In recent decades, scientists have learned a lot about how people create gestural communication systems and the circumstances under which this happens
As participants’ vocalizations became more communicatively effective over rounds, they became shorter and more stable in form. These findings show that people can create novel, non-linguistic vocalizations to express a range of meanings, and that even after relatively few interactions, these vocalizations begin to conventionalize into a system of symbols
We found that for a few of the 18 items examined here— few, near and far—the ability of naive listeners to guess their meaning was quite limited and did not exceed chance performance. (For comparison, it is worth noting that when non-signing English speakers viewed undisputedly iconic American Sign Language (ASL) signs and attempted to guess their meanings in a five-alternative multiple choice format, they were no better than chance for the great majority of signs [52].) guessing accuracy for playback was low for these meanings, on the production end, charades players were consistent in using the duration of their vocalizations to distinguish few from many

Summary

Introduction

Scientists have learned a lot about how people create gestural communication systems and the circumstances under which this happens. Observations span the origins of highly sophisticated urban and rural signed languages used by deaf people and their communities [1,2,3,4,5], home sign systems devised by deaf children to communicate with hearing carers [6], and alternative sign languages used by hearing people under different conditions in which speech is disadvantaged or suppressed [7,8]. Experimental studies with hearing participants show how, when prohibited from speaking, people quickly improvise more language-like means of gesturing [9]. We know very little about how people create vocal communication systems, 2015 The Authors.

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion