The Potential for Iconicity in Vocalization

Abstract The innovation of iconic gestures is essential to establishing the symbolic vocabularies of signed languages, but what is the potential for iconicity in vocalization and the origins of spoken words? Can people create novel vocalizations that are comprehensible to a na?ve listener, without prior convention? We launched a contest in which participants submitted a set of non-linguistic vocalizations for 30 meanings spanning actions, humans, animals, inanimate objects, properties, quantifiers and demonstratives. The winner – who received a monetary prize – was judged by the ability of na?ve listeners to successfully infer the meanings of the created vocalizations. Among our participants were eight teams and individuals affiliated with prominent linguistics and language evolution programs in the US and Europe. We report the results from the contest, along with a series of experiments and analyses designed to assess how comprehensible the vocalizations are to na?ve listeners, as well as their iconicity and learnability as category labels. Our findings provide a compelling case of the significant potential to use iconic vocalizations to communicate about a wide range of meanings, thereby demonstrating the iconic potential of speech and its origin.