From Invasive to Iconic

Structural Learning from Iconic Representations

Iconic Agreement

Two apparently contradictory insights about sign language can be made compatible within a formal semantic analysis: (i) the claim that directional verbs incorporate agreement markers/pronouns (e.g. Lillo-Martin and Meier 2011); (ii) the observation that directional verbs have an iconic component (e.g. Liddell 2003). I sketch formal rules that integrate iconic requirements with standard semantic...

Limits to the usability of iconic memory

Human vision briefly retains a trace of a stimulus after it disappears. This trace-iconic memory-is often believed to be a surrogate for the original stimulus, a representational structure that can be used as if the original stimulus were still present. To investigate its nature, a flicker-search paradigm was developed that relied upon a full scan (rather than partial report) of its contents. R...

Iconic Features

Sign languages are known to display the same general grammatical properties as spoken languages ('Universal Grammar'), but also to make greater use of iconic mechanisms. In Schlenker et al., to appear, it was argued that loci (= positions in signing space corresponding to discourse referents) can have an iconic semantics, in the sense that certain geometric relations among loci (subset and rela...

Limits to the Use of Iconic Memory

147 Word count (body): 3420 Word count (notes + Acknowledgement) 581 Author Notes Most of this work was done while the author was with Cambridge Basic Research, Nissan Research & Development, Inc., Cambridge, MA USA. Many thanks to Duncan Bryce, Puishan Lam, Nayantara Santhi, and Monica Strauss for their help in running the experiments. Correspondence should be addressed to R.A. Rensink, Depart...