IconicITA: Iconicity ratings of the Italian affective lexicon

by Andrea Gregor de Varda, Tommaso Lamarra, Andrea Amelio Ravelli, Chiara Saponaro, Beatrice Giustolisi, Marianna Bolognesi

Iconicity, defined as the potential of linguistic signs to resemble properties or features of their referents, is increasingly recognized as a general property of language. One common approach for quantifying iconicity is to collect iconicity ratings. Although iconicity datasets have been developed for several languages, no comprehensive dataset of iconicity ratings is currently available for Italian. The current study presents IconicITA, the first dataset of Italian iconicity ratings for the 1,121 words of the Italian adaptation of Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW). Ratings were collected from both Italian native speakers (L1) and English native speakers with Italian as a second language (L2). Including L2 participants allowed us to contribute to the debate on whether iconicity ratings genuinely measure form-meaning resemblance, rather than exclusively reflecting semantic properties. We showed that L1 Italian iconicity ratings are positively associated with perceptual strength in the auditory and haptic modalities, and with specificity ratings. Conversely, we found a negative correlation between iconicity and concreteness, age of acquisition, word frequency, and letter frequency. In general, the relationship between Italian iconicity norms and various psycholinguistic variables largely replicated previous findings in the literature on iconicity. Considering L2 data, the ratings provided by L2 speakers correlated more strongly with the Italian L1 data compared to the translation-equivalent English L1 data. This finding suggests that participants’ judgments were influenced not only by the semantic information of the words but also by language-specific form-level properties. We take this result as evidence of the validity of iconicity ratings to operationalize the degree of resemblance between words’ form and meaning.