Iconicity in sign language processing

Abstract This chapter examines iconicity in sign language processing, emphasizing its influence on lexical comprehension and production. Iconicity, the motivated mapping between form and meaning, is a significant feature of sign languages but lacks a clear definition. The concept of iconicity in sign languages is discussed from various perspectives, including iconicity as an objective property of signs and iconicity as a subjective relationship influenced by the perceiver. The chapter addresses challenges in defining and measuring this complex phenomenon and evaluates methods for obtaining iconicity ratings from signers and non-signers. It concludes that most methods are often not able to fully capture the nuances of iconicity. Instead, many iconicity rating tasks focus on certain aspects of iconic mappings, such as transparency or guessability, while overlooking other aspects, such as the type of resemblance or the signer’s subjective experience.