Wilding, E., Winter, B., Littlemore, J., & Perlman, M. (2025). Iconic words are associated with iconic gestures. Cog. Sci., 49(8), e70098. 10.1111/cogs.70098
Wilding, E., Winter, B., Littlemore, J., & Perlman, M. (2025). Iconic words are associated with iconic gestures. Cog. Sci., 49(8), e70098. 10.1111/cogs.70098
Iconicity ratings studies have established that there are many English words which native speakers judge as “iconic,” that is, as sounding like what they mean. Here, we explore whether these iconic English words are more likely to be accompanied by iconic gestures. We report a large-scale quantitative study comparing the gesture rate of words rated as high in iconicity (e.g., swoosh, puffy, crispy) to those rated as low in iconicity (e.g., ordain, rejoin, grateful), balancing for perceptual strength, part-of-speech, and syllable length. Five thousand seven hundred and twenty-five tokens from the TV News Archive were coded for whether speakers produced a gesture with the word, and whether the gesture was iconic. The results show that high iconicity words have a higher overall gesture rate (69%) than low iconicity words (56%): specifically, high iconicity words have a higher iconic gesture rate (24% vs. 11%). This effect is more pronounced among verbs than adjectives, which we hypothesize may be due to the dynamic nature of verbs. We also find that this result persists when controlling for perceptual and action strength ratings, suggesting that word-level iconicity is a more important predictor than sensorimotor strength of whether a speaker will use an iconic gesture. We find that some high iconicity words are more likely to occur with iconic gestures when they come with markers of syntactic isolation, suggesting that morphosyntactic behavior is also relevant to iconic gesture production. Our findings demonstrate that iconicity in spoken communication is inherently multimodal, manifesting in both speech and gesture simultaneously, and that iconicity is often psychologically active when speakers use conventionalized iconic words.
Wilding, E., Bartl, S., Littlemore, J., Clark, M. and Brooke, J. (2023) A metaphor analysis of older adults’ lived experience of household isolation during COVID-19. Front. Commun., 7:1015562. 10.3389/fcomm.2022.1015562
In March 2020, Public Health England provided social distancing and shielding guidance for all adults aged 70 and over in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This article seeks to provide insight into the lived experiences of older people during this period of household isolation. To do so, we analysed the metaphors used by 13 older adults during interviews discussing their experiences of household isolation, focusing on how these metaphors relate to a loss of agency. We found that participants negotiated their sense of agency through the use of metaphors involving physical force, movement, space, and animation of COVID-19. Metaphors were particularly used to discuss negative emotional impacts of the pandemic. Perceptions of a loss of agency were sometimes redressed through the use of comforting metaphors involving patterns and structure. In addition, participants explicitly rejected or refashioned dominant public metaphors that circulated as part of Government campaigns and wider public discourse to describe the pandemic and encourage certain behaviors. It has been argued that commonly used metaphors relating to containment, e.g., “bubble”, when applied to the context of household isolation, foreground the actions of those outside the container rather than those inside it, leading to a loss of feelings of agency. The participants' reactions to these suggest that common metaphors in public discourses are appropriated selectively and challenged by those at whom they are targeted. Hence, metaphor analysis can be used to paint a rich picture of the lived experience of older people experiencing household isolation, including their reaction to dominant public metaphors.