A lexical database of British Sign Language (BSL) and German Sign Language (DGS): Iconicity ratings, iconic strategies, and concreteness norms

Iconicity, understood as a resemblance relationship between meaning and form, is an important variable that has important psycholinguistic effects in lexical processing and language learning across modalities of language. With the growing interest in iconicity, clear operationalizations in terms of the different ways in which iconicity is construed and measured are critical for establishing its broader psycholinguistic profile. This study reports a normed database of iconicity ratings for the same concepts in British Sign Language (BSL) and German Sign Language (DGS). As a related dimension, we also report the type of iconic mapping strategy, i.e., a nominal variable that reflects the different ways in which signs make form-meaning associations for each sign. Finally, we include concreteness ratings for the same concepts. Data from deaf and hearing signers show that iconicity ratings are strongly correlated across both languages, with different distributions across the different strategies, and skewed towards the iconic end of the scale for all groups except German hearing non-signers. Concreteness ratings in BSL and DGS are correlated, though more weakly, and skewed towards the concrete end of the scale. Interestingly, this differs from findings for spoken languages, where concreteness ratings exhibit substantially stronger correlations and abstract concepts are more predominantly represented. We also find that iconicity and concreteness ratings have a moderate positive and strong positive correlation in BSL and DGS, respectively. These results will be useful in psycholinguistic research and highlight differences that can be attributed to the manual-visual modality of signs.