TY - JOUR

T1 - Does De-Iconization Affect Visual Recognition of Russian and English Iconic Words?

AU - Lavitskaya , Yulia

AU - Sedelkina, Yulia

AU - Korotaevskaya , Elizaveta

AU - Tkacheva, Liubov

AU - Flaksman , Maria

AU - Nasledov, Andrey

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

PY - 2022/6

Y1 - 2022/6

N2 - Iconic words constitute an integral part of the lexicon of a language, exhibiting form-meaning resemblance. Over the course of time, semantic and phonetic transformations “weaken” the degree of iconicity of a word. This iconicity loss is known as the process of de-iconization, which is divided into four stages, and, at each consecutive stage, the degree of a word’s iconicity is reduced. The current experimental study is the first to compare and contrast how English (N = 50) and Russian (N = 106) subjects recognize visually presented native iconic words (N = 32). Our aim is two-fold: first, to identify native speakers’ ability to perceive the fine-grained division of iconicity; and second, to control for the influence of participants’ native languages. This enables us to provide a more exhaustive analysis of the role of iconicity in word recognition and to combine empirical results with a theoretical perspective. The findings showed that the speakers of these languages are not equally sensitive to iconicity. As opposed to the English-speaking participants, who showed almost similar performance on each group of iconic words, the Russian participants tended to respond slower and less accurately to the words that were higher in iconicity. We discuss the major factors that may affect iconic word recognition in each language.

AB - Iconic words constitute an integral part of the lexicon of a language, exhibiting form-meaning resemblance. Over the course of time, semantic and phonetic transformations “weaken” the degree of iconicity of a word. This iconicity loss is known as the process of de-iconization, which is divided into four stages, and, at each consecutive stage, the degree of a word’s iconicity is reduced. The current experimental study is the first to compare and contrast how English (N = 50) and Russian (N = 106) subjects recognize visually presented native iconic words (N = 32). Our aim is two-fold: first, to identify native speakers’ ability to perceive the fine-grained division of iconicity; and second, to control for the influence of participants’ native languages. This enables us to provide a more exhaustive analysis of the role of iconicity in word recognition and to combine empirical results with a theoretical perspective. The findings showed that the speakers of these languages are not equally sensitive to iconicity. As opposed to the English-speaking participants, who showed almost similar performance on each group of iconic words, the Russian participants tended to respond slower and less accurately to the words that were higher in iconicity. We discuss the major factors that may affect iconic word recognition in each language.

KW - de-iconization; iconicity; lexical decision task; diachronic evaluation of the imitative lexicon; English/Russian

KW - diachronic evaluation of the imitative lexicon

KW - de-iconization

KW - lexical decision task

KW - English/Russian

KW - iconicity

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85129182838&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/5e3002bb-1fea-3887-8bdf-339a73c78564/

U2 - https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7020097

DO - https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7020097

M3 - Article

VL - 7

JO - Languages

JF - Languages

SN - 2226-471X

IS - 2

M1 - 97

ER -