We describe complementary iconic and symbolic representations for parsing the visual world. The iconic pixmap representation is operated on by an extensible set of “visual routines” (Ullman, 1984; Forbus et al., 2001). A symbolic representation, in terms of lines, ellipses, blobs, etc., is extracted from the iconic encoding, manipulated algebraically, and re-rendered iconically. The two represe...

Two decades ago, ‘1971’ was deemed to not have a market within Indian publishing houses and media outlets. Yet, one is struck by the contemporary focus on iconic figure of Birangona – brave women, title given State Bangladesh women raped Pakistani army their Bengali non-Bengali collaborators during war 1971. It important engage with public memory wartime sexual violence 1971 beyond horrific con...

BACKGROUND Previous research has found that people with aphasia produce more spontaneous iconic gesture than control participants, especially during word-finding difficulties. There is some evidence that impaired semantic knowledge impacts on the diversity of gestural handshapes, as well as the frequency of gesture production. However, no previous research has explored how impaired semantic kno...

This paper examines the use of iconic words in early conversations between children and caregivers. The longitudinal data include a span of six observations of 35 children-parent dyads in the same semi-structured activity. Our findings show that children’s speech initially has a high proportion of iconic words, and over time, these words become diluted by an increase of arbitrary words. Parents...

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...

This article addresses the potential of autophotography to generate new insights into meanings iconic sites. It draws on photographic and interview data collected as part a broader study exploring everyday urban sense-making university students in Liverpool, UK. Iconic sites featured prominently participants' images meaningful city spaces well spoken accounts photo-elicitation interviews. Visua...

Natural sign languages and gestures are complex communicative systems that allow the incorporation of features of a referent into their structure. They differ, however, in that signs are more conventionalised because they consist of meaningless phonological parameters. There is some evidence that despite non-signers finding iconic signs more memorable they can have more difficulty at articulati...

The influence of sensorimotor interference was examined in two experiments that compared pointing with iconic arrows and verbal responding in a task that entailed locating target-objects from imagined perspectives. Participants studied text narratives describing objects at locations around them in a remote environment and then responded to targets from memory. Results revealed only minor differ...

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...