Implications of the “Language as Situated” View for Written Iconicity

In their review, Murgiano, Motamedi, and Vigliocco (2020) lay out a new perspective in which they argue that language should be understood as a situated phenomenon. This perspective has implications for the study of written language, which is fundamentally an un-situated phenomenon. We consider the implications of this perspective for iconicity as it appears in written language. We argue that typical methods for studying word processing (e.g., the lexical decision task) may be bound to underestimate the relevance of iconicity for language. In addition, the typical approach of collecting ratings of individual words on a lexical-semantic dimension may not be well suited to quantifying iconicity. Nevertheless, we believe the field should continue to explore effects of iconicity in language processing, and we discuss some potential ways to adjust traditional word processing tasks.