We are pleased to announce the publication of a new paper by Arthur, Thomas (joint first authors), Aaron, and Youngah in the journal Cognitive Linguistics.

The paper, titled “Iconic hand gestures from ideophones exhibit stability and emergent phonological properties: an iterated learning study,” explores the stability and phonological properties of iconic hand gestures associated with ideophones. Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery and are usually considered iconic by native speakers. The study investigates how these gestures are transmitted across generations using a linear iterated learning paradigm.

The findings reveal that despite noise in the visual signal, participants’ hand gestures converged, indicating the emergence of phonological targets. Handshape configurations over time exhibited finger coordination reminiscent of unmarked handshapes observed in phonological inventories of signed languages. Well-replicated gestures were correlated with well-guessed ideophones from a spoken language study, highlighting the complementary nature of the visual and spoken modalities in formulating mental representations.