Vol 3 No 1 (2025)
Articles
The Role of Iconicity in Language Evolution and Processing: Bridging Embodiment and Symbolic Representation
Published
May 2, 2025
Keywords
- Iconicity,
- Embodied Cognition,
- Language Evolution,
- Sign Language,
- Psycholinguistics
How to Cite
Oko, E., & Mbey, E. (2025). The Role of Iconicity in Language Evolution and Processing: Bridging Embodiment and Symbolic Representation. Advances in Law, Pedagogy, and Multidisciplinary Humanities, 3(1), 296-323. Retrieved from https://jurnal.fs.umi.ac.id/index.php/alpamet/article/view/920
Abstract
The debate over the nature of linguistic representation has long been divided between formalist approaches (e.g., generative grammar) and functionalist-cognitive perspectives. This paper explores the role of iconicity—the direct resemblance between linguistic form and meaning—in language structure, evolution, and processing. Drawing on evidence from psycholinguistics, sign languages, and emerging neurocognitive research, We argue that iconicity serves as a crucial bridge between embodied experience and abstract linguistic symbols. Findings suggest that iconicity facilitates language acquisition, enhances memory retention, and may have played a foundational role in the emergence of language. The implications challenge purely arbitrary models of language (e.g., Saussurean arbitrariness) and support a more dynamic, multimodal view of linguistic representation.
References
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Arbib, M. A. (2012). How the brain got language: The mirror system hypothesis. Oxford University Press.
Asano, R., Boeckx, C., & Fujita, K. (2021). Neural evidence for the predictive nature of sound symbolism. Scientific Reports, 11(1), 17117.
Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617-645.
Bergen, B. (2012). Louder than words: The new science of how the mind makes meaning. Basic Books.
Bergen, B. K. (2004). The psychological reality of phonaesthemes. Language, 80(2), 290-311.
Blasi, D. E., Wichmann, S., Hammarström, H., Stadler, P. F., & Christiansen, M. H. (2016). Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(39), 10818-10823.
Blasi, D. E., Wichmann, S., Hammarström, H., Stadler, P. F., & Christiansen, M. H. (2021). Systematic sound-symbolism across thousands of languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(12), e2021970118.
Blythe, J., Mardigan, K. C., Perdjert, M., & Wightman, G. (2016). Pointing out directions in Murrinhpatha. Open Linguistics, 2(1), 132-159.
Bremner, A. J., Caparos, S., Davidoff, J., de Fockert, J., Linnell, K. J., & Spence, C. (2013). "Bouba" and "Kiki" in Namibia? A remote culture make similar shape-sound matches, but different shape-taste matches to Westerners. Cognition, 126(2), 165-172.
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. MIT Press.
Corballis, M. C. (2002). From hand to mouth: The origins of language. Princeton University Press.
Danesi, M. (2017). The semiotics of emoji: The rise of visual language in the age of the internet. Bloomsbury.
Dingemanse, M. (2012). Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones. Language and Linguistics Compass, 6(10), 654-672.
Dingemanse, M. (2015). Ideophones and reduplication: Depiction, description, and the interpretation of repeated talk in discourse. Studies in Language, 39(4), 946-970.
Dingemanse, M., & Akita, K. (2021). The emergence of systematicity in vocabulary: Iconicity in lexical networks. Cognitive Science, 45(6), e12991.
Dingemanse, M., Blasi, D. E., Lupyan, G., Christiansen, M. H., & Monaghan, P. (2015). Arbitrariness, iconicity, and systematicity in language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(10), 603-615.
Emmorey, K. (2014). Iconicity as structure mapping. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 369(1651), 20130301.
Evans, V. (2017). The emoji code: How smiley faces, love hearts and thumbs up are changing the way we communicate. Journal of Pragmatics, 134, 101-105.
Fay, N., Lister, C. J., Ellison, T. M., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2014). Creating a communication system from scratch: Gesture beats vocalization hands down. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 354.
Frishberg, N. (1975). Arbitrariness and iconicity: Historical change in American Sign Language. Language, 51(3), 696-719.
Gasser, M. (2004). The origins of arbitrariness in language. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 26, 434-439.
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Güldemann, T. (2018). The speech sound and the sound symbol: Ideophones as words and gestures. Studies in Language, 42(4), 734-772.
Hobson, H., & Lee, A. (2020). The role of iconicity in emerging sign languages. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 579733.
Hockett, C. F. (1960). The origin of speech. Scientific American, 203(3), 88-97.
Hurford, J. R. (2014). The origins of language: A slim guide. Oxford University Press.
Imai, M., & Kita, S. (2014). The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 369(1651), 20130298.
Jeon, M. (2021). Sound design for voice user interfaces: The role of non-speech audio in human-computer interaction. *International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 156*, 102712.
Jörg, S., Jörg, S., Hirzle, T., Fischbach, M., & Gabbard, J. L. (2020). A survey of augmented reality in language learning. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 26(5), 1911-1929.
Kim, K.-O. (2015). How Korean sound symbolism shows the iconic link between sound and meaning. The Journal of Language Sciences, 22(1), 1-19.
Kirby, S., Tamariz, M., Cornish, H., & Smith, K. (2015). Compression and communication in the cultural evolution of linguistic structure. Cognition, 141, 87-102.
Klink, R. R. (2020). Creating brand names with meaning: The use of sound symbolism. Marketing Letters, 31(1), 31-41.
Leonard, W. Y. (2022). Indigenous language revitalization and documentation: A view from the field. Annual Review of Linguistics, 8, 437-455.
Lockwood, G., & Tuomainen, J. (2015). Ideophones in Japanese modulate the P2 and late positive complex responses. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 933.
Lockwood, G., Hagoort, P., & Dingemanse, M. (2016). How iconicity helps people learn new words: Neural correlates and individual differences in sound-symbolic bootstrapping. Cognition, 149, 214-220.
Lyn, H. (2012). Apes and the evolution of language: Taking stock of 40 years of research. In J. Vonk & T. K. Shackelford (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of comparative evolutionary psychology (pp. 356-378). Oxford University Press.
Macedonia, M., & von Kriegstein, K. (2012). Gestures enhance foreign language learning. Biolinguistics, 6(3-4), 393-416.
Maloney, D., Freeman, G., & Wohn, D. Y. (2023). The language of VR: Iconicity in virtual reality communication. *Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 7*(1), 1-25.
Maracle, B. J. (2018). The syntax of Mohawk ideophones. International Journal of American Linguistics, 84(2), 181-215.
Maurer, D., Pathman, T., & Mondloch, C. J. (2006). The shape of boubas: Sound-shape correspondences in toddlers and adults. Developmental Science, 9(3), 316-322.
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. University of Chicago Press.
Meir, I., Sandler, W., Padden, C., & Aronoff, M. (2010). Emerging sign languages. Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language, and Education, 2, 267-280.
Müller, C., & Cienki, A. (2009). Words, gestures, and beyond: Forms of multimodal metaphor in the use of spoken language. In C. Forceville & E. Urios-Aparisi (Eds.), Multimodal metaphor (pp. 297-328). Mouton de Gruyter.
Nuckolls, J. B. (1996). Sounds like life: Sound-symbolic grammar, performance, and cognition in Pastaza Quechua. Oxford University Press.
Ozturk, O., Krehm, M., & Vouloumanos, A. (2013). Sound symbolism in infancy: Evidence for sound–shape cross-modal correspondences in 4-month-olds. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 114(2), 173-186.
Padden, C., Meir, I., Hwang, S., Lepic, R., Seegers, S., & Sampson, T. (2013). Patterned iconicity in sign language lexicons. Gesture, 13(3), 287-308.
Park, S., & Choi, S. (2022). Haptic iconicity: Designing meaningful touch feedback in mobile interfaces. International Journal of Design, 16(2), 45-60.
Perniss, P. (2018). Why we need to investigate casual speech to truly understand language production, processing, and the mental lexicon. The Mental Lexicon, 13(3), 277-299.
Perniss, P., & Vigliocco, G. (2014). The bridge of iconicity: From a world of experience to the experience of language. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 369(1651), 20130300.
Perniss, P., & Vigliocco, G. (2019). The bridge of iconicity: From a world of experience to the experience of language. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 374(1789), 20180379.
Perniss, P., Thompson, R. L., & Vigliocco, G. (2010). Iconicity as a general property of language: Evidence from spoken and signed languages. Frontiers in Psychology, 1, 227.
Perry, L. K., Perlman, M., Winter, B., Massaro, D. W., & Lupyan, G. (2015). Iconicity in English and Spanish and its relation to lexical category and age of acquisition. PLoS ONE, 10(9), e0137147.
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Ravignani, A., Thompson, B., & Filippi, P. (2021). The evolution of musicality: What can be learned from language evolution research? Frontiers in Neuroscience, 15, 632234.
Rose, M. L., Mok, Z., & Sekine, K. (2019). The role of gesture in communication and cognition: Implications for understanding and treating neurogenic communication disorders. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 13, 405.
Sandler, W., Aronoff, M., Meir, I., & Padden, C. (2014). Language emergence: Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language. In B. MacWhinney, A. Malchukov, & E. Moravcsik (Eds.), Competing motivations in grammar and usage (pp. 465-482). Oxford University Press.
Saussure, F. de. (1959). Course in general linguistics (W. Baskin, Trans.). Philosophical Library. (Original work published 1916)
Senghas, A., & Coppola, M. (2022). The emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language: Questions of development, acquisition, and evolution. Journal of Child Language, 49(1), 1-25.
Senghas, A., Kita, S., & Özyürek, A. (2004). Children creating core properties of language: Evidence from an emerging sign language in Nicaragua. Science, 305(5691), 1779-1782.
Sicoli, M. A. (2016). Repair organization in whistled speech. Language, 92(2), 411-432.
Sonesson, G. (2018). Iconicity strikes back: The third generation—or why cognitive semiotics is needed. Cognitive Semiotics, 11(1), 1-20.
Strickland, B., Geraci, C., Chemla, E., Schlenker, P., Kelepir, M., & Pfau, R. (2020). Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(3), 1482-1489.
Styles, S. J., & Gawne, L. (2017). When does maluma/takete fail? Two key failures and a meta-analysis suggest that phonology and phonotactics matter. *i-Perception, 8*(4), 1-17.
Tamasi, T., McKeown, G., Roberts, S. G., & Monaghan, P. (2022). The emergence of systematicity in vocabulary: Iconicity in lexical networks. Cognitive Science, 46(1), e13082.
Taub, S. F. (2001). Language from the body: Iconicity and metaphor in American Sign Language. Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, R. L., Vinson, D. P., Woll, B., & Vigliocco, G. (2012). The road to language learning is iconic: Evidence from British Sign Language. Psychological Science, 23(12), 1443-1448.
Tieu, L., Schlenker, P., & Chemla, E. (2021). Iconic plurality. Linguistics and Philosophy, 44(1), 1-44.
Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of human communication. MIT Press.
Tsur, R. (2020). Poetic rhythm: Structure and performance—An empirical study in cognitive poetics (2nd ed.). Sussex Academic Press.
Tyler, M. D., Best, C. T., Faber, A., & Levitt, A. G. (2020). Perceptual assimilation and discrimination of non-native vowel contrasts. Phonetica, 77(1), 1-30.
Varis, P. (2020). Digital ethnography. In The Routledge handbook of language and digital communication (pp. 55-68). Routledge.
Webster, A. K. (2015). Intimate grammars: An ethnography of Navajo poetry. University of Arizona Press.
Webster, A. K., & Peterson, L. (2021). Ethnopoetics, ideophones, and the aesthetics of invocation. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 31(2), 150-169.
Winter, B., Perlman, M., Perry, L. K., & Lupyan, G. (2017). Which words are most iconic? Interaction Studies, 18(3), 443-464.
Winter, B., Perlman, M., Perry, L. K., & Lupyan, G. (2022). Iconicity ratings for 14,000+ English words. Behavior Research Methods, 54(1), 1-15.
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Akita, K., & Usuki, T. (2016). A gradient approach to mimetic word formation in Japanese. Journal of Japanese Linguistics, 32(1), 3-24.
Arbib, M. A. (2005). From monkey-like action recognition to human language: An evolutionary framework for neurolinguistics. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(2), 105-124.
Arbib, M. A. (2012). How the brain got language: The mirror system hypothesis. Oxford University Press.
Asano, R., Boeckx, C., & Fujita, K. (2021). Neural evidence for the predictive nature of sound symbolism. Scientific Reports, 11(1), 17117.
Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617-645.
Bergen, B. (2012). Louder than words: The new science of how the mind makes meaning. Basic Books.
Bergen, B. K. (2004). The psychological reality of phonaesthemes. Language, 80(2), 290-311.
Blasi, D. E., Wichmann, S., Hammarström, H., Stadler, P. F., & Christiansen, M. H. (2016). Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(39), 10818-10823.
Blasi, D. E., Wichmann, S., Hammarström, H., Stadler, P. F., & Christiansen, M. H. (2021). Systematic sound-symbolism across thousands of languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(12), e2021970118.
Blythe, J., Mardigan, K. C., Perdjert, M., & Wightman, G. (2016). Pointing out directions in Murrinhpatha. Open Linguistics, 2(1), 132-159.
Bremner, A. J., Caparos, S., Davidoff, J., de Fockert, J., Linnell, K. J., & Spence, C. (2013). "Bouba" and "Kiki" in Namibia? A remote culture make similar shape-sound matches, but different shape-taste matches to Westerners. Cognition, 126(2), 165-172.
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. MIT Press.
Corballis, M. C. (2002). From hand to mouth: The origins of language. Princeton University Press.
Danesi, M. (2017). The semiotics of emoji: The rise of visual language in the age of the internet. Bloomsbury.
Dingemanse, M. (2012). Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones. Language and Linguistics Compass, 6(10), 654-672.
Dingemanse, M. (2015). Ideophones and reduplication: Depiction, description, and the interpretation of repeated talk in discourse. Studies in Language, 39(4), 946-970.
Dingemanse, M., & Akita, K. (2021). The emergence of systematicity in vocabulary: Iconicity in lexical networks. Cognitive Science, 45(6), e12991.
Dingemanse, M., Blasi, D. E., Lupyan, G., Christiansen, M. H., & Monaghan, P. (2015). Arbitrariness, iconicity, and systematicity in language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(10), 603-615.
Emmorey, K. (2014). Iconicity as structure mapping. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 369(1651), 20130301.
Evans, V. (2017). The emoji code: How smiley faces, love hearts and thumbs up are changing the way we communicate. Journal of Pragmatics, 134, 101-105.
Fay, N., Lister, C. J., Ellison, T. M., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2014). Creating a communication system from scratch: Gesture beats vocalization hands down. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 354.
Frishberg, N. (1975). Arbitrariness and iconicity: Historical change in American Sign Language. Language, 51(3), 696-719.
Gasser, M. (2004). The origins of arbitrariness in language. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 26, 434-439.
Gaver, W. W. (1989). The SonicFinder: An interface that uses auditory icons. Human–Computer Interaction, 4(1), 67-94.
Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford University Press.
Goldin-Meadow, S. (2003). The resilience of language: What gesture creation in deaf children can tell us about how all children learn language. Psychology Press.
Goldin-Meadow, S., McNeill, D., & Singleton, J. (2008). Silence is liberating: Removing the handcuffs on grammatical expression in the manual modality. Psychological Review, 115(2), 397-421.
Graham, K. E., Hobaiter, C., Ounsley, J., Furuichi, T., & Byrne, R. W. (2022). Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning. PLOS Biology, 20(1), e3001389.
Güldemann, T. (2018). The speech sound and the sound symbol: Ideophones as words and gestures. Studies in Language, 42(4), 734-772.
Hobson, H., & Lee, A. (2020). The role of iconicity in emerging sign languages. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 579733.
Hockett, C. F. (1960). The origin of speech. Scientific American, 203(3), 88-97.
Hurford, J. R. (2014). The origins of language: A slim guide. Oxford University Press.
Imai, M., & Kita, S. (2014). The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 369(1651), 20130298.
Jeon, M. (2021). Sound design for voice user interfaces: The role of non-speech audio in human-computer interaction. *International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 156*, 102712.
Jörg, S., Jörg, S., Hirzle, T., Fischbach, M., & Gabbard, J. L. (2020). A survey of augmented reality in language learning. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 26(5), 1911-1929.
Kim, K.-O. (2015). How Korean sound symbolism shows the iconic link between sound and meaning. The Journal of Language Sciences, 22(1), 1-19.
Kirby, S., Tamariz, M., Cornish, H., & Smith, K. (2015). Compression and communication in the cultural evolution of linguistic structure. Cognition, 141, 87-102.
Klink, R. R. (2020). Creating brand names with meaning: The use of sound symbolism. Marketing Letters, 31(1), 31-41.
Leonard, W. Y. (2022). Indigenous language revitalization and documentation: A view from the field. Annual Review of Linguistics, 8, 437-455.
Lockwood, G., & Tuomainen, J. (2015). Ideophones in Japanese modulate the P2 and late positive complex responses. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 933.
Lockwood, G., Hagoort, P., & Dingemanse, M. (2016). How iconicity helps people learn new words: Neural correlates and individual differences in sound-symbolic bootstrapping. Cognition, 149, 214-220.
Lyn, H. (2012). Apes and the evolution of language: Taking stock of 40 years of research. In J. Vonk & T. K. Shackelford (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of comparative evolutionary psychology (pp. 356-378). Oxford University Press.
Macedonia, M., & von Kriegstein, K. (2012). Gestures enhance foreign language learning. Biolinguistics, 6(3-4), 393-416.
Maloney, D., Freeman, G., & Wohn, D. Y. (2023). The language of VR: Iconicity in virtual reality communication. *Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 7*(1), 1-25.
Maracle, B. J. (2018). The syntax of Mohawk ideophones. International Journal of American Linguistics, 84(2), 181-215.
Maurer, D., Pathman, T., & Mondloch, C. J. (2006). The shape of boubas: Sound-shape correspondences in toddlers and adults. Developmental Science, 9(3), 316-322.
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. University of Chicago Press.
Meir, I., Sandler, W., Padden, C., & Aronoff, M. (2010). Emerging sign languages. Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language, and Education, 2, 267-280.
Müller, C., & Cienki, A. (2009). Words, gestures, and beyond: Forms of multimodal metaphor in the use of spoken language. In C. Forceville & E. Urios-Aparisi (Eds.), Multimodal metaphor (pp. 297-328). Mouton de Gruyter.
Nuckolls, J. B. (1996). Sounds like life: Sound-symbolic grammar, performance, and cognition in Pastaza Quechua. Oxford University Press.
Ozturk, O., Krehm, M., & Vouloumanos, A. (2013). Sound symbolism in infancy: Evidence for sound–shape cross-modal correspondences in 4-month-olds. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 114(2), 173-186.
Padden, C., Meir, I., Hwang, S., Lepic, R., Seegers, S., & Sampson, T. (2013). Patterned iconicity in sign language lexicons. Gesture, 13(3), 287-308.
Park, S., & Choi, S. (2022). Haptic iconicity: Designing meaningful touch feedback in mobile interfaces. International Journal of Design, 16(2), 45-60.
Perniss, P. (2018). Why we need to investigate casual speech to truly understand language production, processing, and the mental lexicon. The Mental Lexicon, 13(3), 277-299.
Perniss, P., & Vigliocco, G. (2014). The bridge of iconicity: From a world of experience to the experience of language. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 369(1651), 20130300.
Perniss, P., & Vigliocco, G. (2019). The bridge of iconicity: From a world of experience to the experience of language. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 374(1789), 20180379.
Perniss, P., Thompson, R. L., & Vigliocco, G. (2010). Iconicity as a general property of language: Evidence from spoken and signed languages. Frontiers in Psychology, 1, 227.
Perry, L. K., Perlman, M., Winter, B., Massaro, D. W., & Lupyan, G. (2015). Iconicity in English and Spanish and its relation to lexical category and age of acquisition. PLoS ONE, 10(9), e0137147.
Ramachandran, V. S., & Hubbard, E. M. (2001). Synaesthesia—A window into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8(12), 3-34.
Ravignani, A., Thompson, B., & Filippi, P. (2021). The evolution of musicality: What can be learned from language evolution research? Frontiers in Neuroscience, 15, 632234.
Rose, M. L., Mok, Z., & Sekine, K. (2019). The role of gesture in communication and cognition: Implications for understanding and treating neurogenic communication disorders. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 13, 405.
Sandler, W., Aronoff, M., Meir, I., & Padden, C. (2014). Language emergence: Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language. In B. MacWhinney, A. Malchukov, & E. Moravcsik (Eds.), Competing motivations in grammar and usage (pp. 465-482). Oxford University Press.
Saussure, F. de. (1959). Course in general linguistics (W. Baskin, Trans.). Philosophical Library. (Original work published 1916)
Senghas, A., & Coppola, M. (2022). The emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language: Questions of development, acquisition, and evolution. Journal of Child Language, 49(1), 1-25.
Senghas, A., Kita, S., & Özyürek, A. (2004). Children creating core properties of language: Evidence from an emerging sign language in Nicaragua. Science, 305(5691), 1779-1782.
Sicoli, M. A. (2016). Repair organization in whistled speech. Language, 92(2), 411-432.
Sonesson, G. (2018). Iconicity strikes back: The third generation—or why cognitive semiotics is needed. Cognitive Semiotics, 11(1), 1-20.
Strickland, B., Geraci, C., Chemla, E., Schlenker, P., Kelepir, M., & Pfau, R. (2020). Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(3), 1482-1489.
Styles, S. J., & Gawne, L. (2017). When does maluma/takete fail? Two key failures and a meta-analysis suggest that phonology and phonotactics matter. *i-Perception, 8*(4), 1-17.
Tamasi, T., McKeown, G., Roberts, S. G., & Monaghan, P. (2022). The emergence of systematicity in vocabulary: Iconicity in lexical networks. Cognitive Science, 46(1), e13082.
Taub, S. F. (2001). Language from the body: Iconicity and metaphor in American Sign Language. Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, R. L., Vinson, D. P., Woll, B., & Vigliocco, G. (2012). The road to language learning is iconic: Evidence from British Sign Language. Psychological Science, 23(12), 1443-1448.
Tieu, L., Schlenker, P., & Chemla, E. (2021). Iconic plurality. Linguistics and Philosophy, 44(1), 1-44.
Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of human communication. MIT Press.
Tsur, R. (2020). Poetic rhythm: Structure and performance—An empirical study in cognitive poetics (2nd ed.). Sussex Academic Press.
Tyler, M. D., Best, C. T., Faber, A., & Levitt, A. G. (2020). Perceptual assimilation and discrimination of non-native vowel contrasts. Phonetica, 77(1), 1-30.
Varis, P. (2020). Digital ethnography. In The Routledge handbook of language and digital communication (pp. 55-68). Routledge.
Webster, A. K. (2015). Intimate grammars: An ethnography of Navajo poetry. University of Arizona Press.
Webster, A. K., & Peterson, L. (2021). Ethnopoetics, ideophones, and the aesthetics of invocation. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 31(2), 150-169.
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