Iconic Words Are Associated With Iconic Gestures

Iconicity ratings studies have established that there are many English words which native speakers judge as “iconic,” that is, as sounding like what they mean. Here, we explore whether these iconic English words are more likely to be accompanied by iconic gestures. We report a large-scale quantitative study comparing the gesture rate of words rated as high in iconicity (e.g., swoosh, puffy, crispy) to those rated as low in iconicity (e.g., ordain, rejoin, grateful), balancing for perceptual strength, part-of-speech, and syllable length. Five thousand seven hundred and twenty-five tokens from the TV News Archive were coded for whether speakers produced a gesture with the word, and whether the gesture was iconic. The results show that high iconicity words have a higher overall gesture rate (69%) than low iconicity words (56%): specifically, high iconicity words have a higher iconic gesture rate (24% vs. 11%). This effect is more pronounced among verbs than adjectives, which we hypothesize may be due to the dynamic nature of verbs. We also find that this result persists when controlling for perceptual and action strength ratings, suggesting that word-level iconicity is a more important predictor than sensorimotor strength of whether a speaker will use an iconic gesture. We find that some high iconicity words are more likely to occur with iconic gestures when they come with markers of syntactic isolation, suggesting that morphosyntactic behavior is also relevant to iconic gesture production. Our findings demonstrate that iconicity in spoken communication is inherently multimodal, manifesting in both speech and gesture simultaneously, and that iconicity is often psychologically active when speakers use conventionalized iconic words.