Abstract
Distance iconicity is an instance of grammatical iconicity where the distance between linguistic items diagrammatically reflects the conceptual distance between chunks of reality. Distance iconicity has been critiqued as empirically inadequate from typological positions.
This paper contributes to this discussion by complementing typological data with experimental research. While experimental research in phonological iconicity has a well established tradition, there is a lack of such studies on grammatical iconicity.
For the purpose of this study artificial language learning (ALL) was used. ALL is widely used in psycholinguistics in parsing and word order studies.
In a typical ALL design, two or more versions of a miniature artificial grammar are created, participants learn these variants and potential differences are observed via a variety of test methods. To test the involvement of distance iconicity in the processing of alienability marking (inalienable is conceptually, hence linguistically closer), two variants of artificial language were created with distance-iconic and counter-iconic coding of alienability in adnominal possession.
Participants (n = 40) were randomly assigned to one of the respective grammars and production competence was tested after two training sessions. The groups were compared with respect to scores and reaction times.
Although the two groups did not differ significantly in scores, the results show that learners of iconic grammar performed significantly better in terms of reaction time. This suggests that an isomorphic relation between linguistic structure and the perception of reality may on some level influence ease of processing.
On the whole, this pilot study shows that ALL experiments may be extended beyond its typical applications and provides a new way to test some of our assumptions about the relationship between language and reality.