This study examines how iconicity in Korean Sign Language (KSL) and American Sign Language (ASL) is perceived by deaf KSL signers and Korean hearing non-signers. Twenty participants (i.e., 10 deaf KSL signers and 10 Korean hearing non-signers) completed five rating tasks (i.e., usage, familiarity, KSL iconicity, ASL iconicity, cross-language form similarity) for 32 target signs in a laboratory-based experiment. Group differences were analyzed using Mann-Whitney U Tests. KSL signers assigned higher iconicity ratings to KSL than hearing non-signers, indicating that judgments draw on language-internal associative networks beyond surface form-meaning correspondences. By contrast, the groups did not differ in ASL iconicity, and they gave similarly low cross-linguistic similarity ratings to KSL-ASL pairs. These results replicate and extend the work of Occhino et al. (2017), supporting the view that iconicity is not an intrinsic property of signs but a subjective assessment shaped by language experience and cultural knowledge.
Kang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.