Abstrakt
In distance iconicity, a subtype of grammatical iconicity, the distance between linguistic items reflects the conceptual distance between chunks of reality. In case of alienability marking, inalienable possessa are understood as conceptually closer to possessors and their mutual linguistic closeness in the expression of adnominal possession (e.g. simple juxtaposition v. prepositional phrase) has been interpreted as a diagram of such conceptualization.
Iconicity has drawn attention of many linguists, being implicated as a potentially important factor in various processing situations, such as leaning and acquisition, language contact, and language impairment. This paper explores the possibilities of using the artificial language learning (ALL) paradigm, a well established psycholinguistic experimental method, in the study of distance iconicity.
To test possible influences of distance iconicity on the acquisition of alienability marking, a simple between-subjects ALL experiment was designed. Two variants of a miniature 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 grammars and production competence of both groups was tested after two learning sessions. Although the groups did not differ significantly in test scores, the results show that learners of iconic grammar performed significantly better in terms of reaction time.
This suggests that an association between linguistic structure and perceived reality has a positive influence on learnability of grammar.