The influence of language background on iconicity perception

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.