Much is known about young children's use of deictic gestures such as pointing. Much less is known about their use of other types of communicative gestures, especially iconic or symbolic gestures. In particular, it is unknown whether children can create iconic gestures on the spot to inform others. Study 1 provided 27-month-olds with the opportunity to inform a novice how to perform a task. The ...

So far, approaches towards gesture recognition focused mainly on deictic and emblematic gestures. Iconics, viewed as iconic signs in the sense of Peirce, are different from deictics and emblems, for their relation to the referent is based on similarity. In the work reported here, the breakdown of the complex notion of similarity provides the key idea towards a computational model of gesture sem...

While language conveys meaning largely symbolically, actual communication acts typically contain iconic elements as well: People gesture while they speak, or may even draw sketches while explaining something. Image retrieval prima facie seems like a task that could profit from combined symbolic and iconic reference, but it is typically set up to work either from language only, or via (iconic) s...

Tai (2005) argues for the importance of iconicity as a fundamental property of language, illustrating the modality effects of iconicity through the study of a set of iconic devices used in Taiwan Sign Language (TSL). This paper extends Tai’s research, in exploring the iconic devices used in another Asian sign language, Chinese Sign Language (CSL). Some preliminary comparisons are made in this p...

Scholars have documented substantial classes of iconic vocabulary in many non-Indo-European languages. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English are assumed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic words. In three experiments, we asked English speakers to rate the iconicity of words from the MacArthurBates Communicative Developmental Inventory. We found English—contra...

Sign languages stand out in that there is high prevalence of conventionalised linguistic forms that map directly to their referent (i.e., iconic). Hearing adults show low performance when asked to guess the meaning of iconic signs suggesting that their iconic features are largely inaccessible to them. However, it has not been investigated whether speakers’ gestures, which also share the propert...

Among the factors posing new and complex challenges to coupled natural –human components of iconic parks systems are globalization, climate and environmental change, economic development, population migration, international tourism, land use/land cover dynamics, and political instability of governments and institutions. These challenges are evident in almost all settings and are certainly emerg...

Currently designed Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) propose both iconic and symbolic tangible objects (TO). Since iconic TOs should enable to interact more naturally like in the real world and, hypothetically, require less learning time than symbolic TOs, some questions arise: Why do symbolic TOs exist? When to use iconic or symbolic representation in TOs? This paper discusses these questions an...

In this paper an iconic notation for describing the composition between the relations of a new qualitative representation model based on trajectories in two dimensions is presented. This qualitative representation model represents a new intuitive approach for describing the spatiotemporal features of two mobile entities through the relations between its trajectories. In order to describe the co...

A foundational assumption in linguistics has been that words and their meanings are arbitrarily related; however, this position has been challenged recently. Experiments have shown that both systematic (where similar objects have similar labels) and iconic (words ‘resemble’ the objects they label) associations between words and objects facilitate learning. However, these two literatures remain ...