Imagine learning a new language as if you were solving a puzzle or playing a memory game. That’s what researchers explored in a recent study on iconicity in spoken language. Iconicity refers to the connection between the sound and meaning of words, and it is often thought to make language more memorable. To investigate this, participants were asked to guess and memorize the meanings of ideophones, which are words that represent sounds or depict sensory experiences. Surprisingly, the results showed that while participants were able to guess the meanings of ideophones above chance level, they were equally as good at memorizing them as well as regular adjectives. However, when it came to response time, participants took longer to correctly identify the meaning of adjectives compared to ideophones. This suggests that there is a cognitive advantage in recognizing and processing ideophones due to their iconic nature. In a follow-up task, participants were more likely to choose the correct translations for ideophones rather than adjectives, indicating that iconicity helps with reassessing prior knowledge. Overall, this study highlights how iconicity makes language learning more engaging and accessible. To dive deeper into the research, check out the full article!

Abstract
Iconicity, or the resemblance between form and meaning, is often ascribed to a special status and contrasted with default assumptions of arbitrariness in spoken language. But does iconicity in spoken language have a special status when it comes to learnability? A simple way to gauge learnability is to see how well something is retrieved from memory. We can further contrast this with guessability, to see (1) whether the ease of guessing the meanings of ideophones outperforms the rate at which they are remembered; and (2) how willing participants’ are to reassess what they were taught in a prior task—a novel contribution of this study. We replicate prior guessing and memory tasks using ideophones and adjectives from Japanese, Korean, and Igbo. Our results show that although native Cantonese speakers guessed ideophone meanings above chance level, they memorized both ideophones and adjectives with comparable accuracy. However, response time data show that participants took significantly longer to respond correctly to adjective–meaning pairs—indicating a discrepancy in a cognitive effort that favored the recognition of ideophones. In a follow-up reassessment task, participants who were taught foil translations were more likely to choose the true translations for ideophones rather than adjectives. By comparing the findings from our guessing and memory tasks, we conclude that iconicity is more accessible if a task requires participants to actively seek out sound-meaning associations.

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