Current views about language are dominated by the idea of arbitrary connections between linguistic form and meaning. However, if we look beyond the more familiar Indo-European languages and also include both spoken and signed language modalities, we find that motivated, iconic form-meaning mappings are, in fact, pervasive in language. In this paper, we review the different types of iconic mappings that characterize languages in both modalities, including the predominantly visually iconic mappings found in signed languages. Having shown that iconic mapping are present across languages, we then proceed to review evidence showing that language users (signers and speakers) exploit iconicity in language processing and language acquisition. While not discounting the presence and importance of arbitrariness in language, we put forward the idea that iconicity need also be recognized as a general property of language, which may serve the function of reducing the gap between linguistic form and conceptual representation to allow the language system to "hook up" to motor, perceptual, and affective experience. Keywords: iconicity, sound-symbolism, spoken and signed languages form and meaning. Indeed, if we look at the lexicon of English (or that of other Indo-European languages), we might be forgiven for thinking that there could be anything but a conventionally determined, arbitrary connection between a given word and its referent. For the vast majority of English words there is an arbitrary relationship between form and meaning. There is nothing, for example, in the sequence of sounds represented by /haus/ that indicates that it refers to "a building for human habitation" (house) in English. Language is understood to be a system of conventional symbols shared by a community of users. Users of English must agree about the meaning of /haus/, and this knowledge must be passed on from generation to generation. We can see the stamp of conventionalization even in the case of onomatopoeia, i.e., words like buzz or meow, which imitate sounds in the real world (usually made by objects or animals). The English expression for the sound a rooster makes (cock-a-doodle-doo) is quite different from the German expression (kikiriki), which is different again from the French expression (cocorico), and all of which are arguably quite different from the actual sound which emerges from a rooster. The evidence for conventionalized, arbitrary form-meaning mappings as defining our system of communication seems almost self-evident. Moreover, it is consistent with, and surely engendering of, the idea that language is a wholly symbolic system, the elements of which are manipulated on an abstract level of representation. It is this idea that defines and dominates current, received views about the acquisition, production, and comprehension of language, as, for example, in the strict modular separation of levels for lemma (semantic/grammatical representation) and lexeme (phonological representation) in some models of lexical retrieval and production (e.g., Garrett, 1984; Levelt, 1989; Levelt et al., 1999) . According to these authors, not only are meaning and form represented and
REF provide evidence for non-arbitrary relationships at multiple levels of language, from phonology to syntax.
Iconicity as a General Property of Language: Evidence from Spoken and Signed Languages
Front. Psychology
Computer Science Medicine