Experiments on the emergence of phonological structure show that humans exploit structure in the meaning space to create structure in their sets of signals (Verhoef et al., 2011). This can be regarded as a confounding factor, as iconicity is generally considered to play a minor role in language. However, sound symbolism and onomatopoeia are well-documented. Moreover, in sign languages iconicity plays a more prominent role. But what exactly is iconicity? Formal models of language evolution tend to focus either on structure in the form space or structure in the meaning space, but not on the interaction between the two spaces. Zuidema and Westermann (2003) are an exception. They show that in robust signaling systems, meanings that are close together must be represented by forms that are close together. This defines a form of iconicity. The question then arises why and how complex signaling systems (language) loose iconicity.
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