Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The meanings of iconic signs are usually not easily accessible to sign-naïve people. However, most previous studies asked participants to guess the meaning of iconic signs in isolation and without any context or cues. We ask whether signs whose form is based on more cross-linguistically common underlying motivations are easier to interpret than signs based on less common underlying motivations. Since recent research suggests that iconicity is a relationship of resemblance between the signifier and the signified that is instantiated contextually, we also provide participants with a prompt (in the form of a word). We find that interpretability of iconic signs does correlate with cross-linguistic frequency of the underlying motivation of the sign.