Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences Research Department, Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London London, UK.
Front Psychol. 2010 Dec 31;1:227. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00227. eCollection 2010.
Current views about language are dominated by the idea of arbitrary connections between linguistic form and meaning. However, if we look beyond the more familiar Indo-European languages and also include both spoken and signed language modalities, we find that motivated, iconic form-meaning mappings are, in fact, pervasive in language. In this paper, we review the different types of iconic mappings that characterize languages in both modalities, including the predominantly visually iconic mappings found in signed languages. Having shown that iconic mapping are present across languages, we then proceed to review evidence showing that language users (signers and speakers) exploit iconicity in language processing and language acquisition. While not discounting the presence and importance of arbitrariness in language, we put forward the idea that iconicity need also be recognized as a general property of language, which may serve the function of reducing the gap between linguistic form and conceptual representation to allow the language system to "hook up" to motor, perceptual, and affective experience.
目前关于语言的观点主要是语言形式和意义之间任意联系的观点。然而，如果我们超越更熟悉的印欧语系语言，也包括口语和手语模态，我们就会发现，有动机的、象似的形式-意义映射实际上在语言中无处不在。在本文中，我们回顾了两种模态中语言的不同类型的象似映射，包括在手语中发现的主要是视觉象似的映射。在表明象似映射存在于各种语言之后，我们接着回顾了表明语言使用者（手语使用者和口语使用者）在语言处理和语言习得中利用象似性的证据。虽然我们不否认语言中任意性的存在和重要性，但我们提出这样一种观点，即象似性也需要被视为语言的一个普遍属性，它可以起到缩小语言形式和概念表示之间差距的作用，从而使语言系统能够“连接”到运动、感知和情感体验。
