Think about a word that looks like its meaning. For instance, the word bed kind of looks like a bed, with the vertical lines resembling the posts at either end. Loop looks very loopy.
Some words are more subtly evocative — like blizzard, whose zigzagging letters might evoke something chaotic.
The term for this is “iconicity” and it has typically been studied in the sounds of words. For example, the word meow resembles the sound of a cat. The word teeny sounds like something small.
My recent study explored iconicity in the visual appearance of words in English for the first time. I found that people processed words faster and more accurately when the words physically resembled their meanings.
English letters began as visual symbols
The letters we use in English (which is a Latin script inherited from the Roman alphabet) actually started out as visual symbols. They likely evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
One possibility is that these Egyptian symbols were adopted by speakers of a North Semitic language, around 1800-1600 BC, into what is called the “Proto-Sinaitic” script.
(Wikimedia Commons)
This script used symbols to code for the first sound of the pictured thing. This is called the acrophony principle. For example, our letter M comes from a symbol for water, taking the first sound of the word mayim.
The letters have changed so much that these ancient origins aren’t relevant to reading English today. But there is some evidence that the shapes of letters have some relationship to the sounds they convey. For example, one study assembled letters for the sound /i/ (as in bee) and /u/ (as in boo) from 56 different languages and asked people to guess which was which. It turned out that people could do this, more often than expected by chance.
But this isn’t quite what I was interested in here. Rather than asking if the shapes of letters are related to the sounds of words, I was interested in whether those shapes are related to the meanings of words.
Bubble, hoop, wiggle
In this research, I asked participants to rate more than 3,000 words according to how much the shape of their letters resembled their meaning, using a scale of one to seven.
This is a common approach in the study of psycholinguistics. We often ask people to rate words on one dimension — for example, how concrete a word is, or how positive a word is — and then use those ratings to understand how people process word meaning.
The first thing to note is that there was agreement across participants, at least on par with ratings of other word properties in the past.
The highest-rated words included bubble, look, wiggle, hoop, puppy and bed.
(David Sidhu)
It’s easy to come up with explanations for these ratings. Puppy looks like it has legs and a tail. There is something wiggly about the two G’s in the middle of wiggle.
But can we actually tell how participants made their ratings? We can get some clues by looking at the kinds of words that get higher ratings.
Round letters, spiky letters
Words with high ratings tended to refer to things you can see. This makes sense if participants were actually considering a resemblance between the word and its meaning.
Getting more specific, when a word for a round thing contained round letters (for example, O, G and C), it was rated higher. When a word for a spiky thing contained spiky letters (like W, Z and X), it was rated higher. Words for small things tended to be rated higher when they contained fewer letters.
All in all, it seems like the ratings actually did capture a resemblance between the look of a word and its meaning.
This is all well and good, but does it matter? To answer this, I used three existing databases with information on how quickly people can process individual words. These are from studies that, for example, present participants with strings of letters (for example, spoon or flarg) and have them identify them as real or invented words as quickly as possible.
In all three databases, I found that people were faster and more accurate at processing words that looked like their meanings. This was after accounting for all kinds of things like how common a word is, how many letters it contains and how easy a word’s meaning is to picture. Not only that, these words tended to be learned at an earlier age.
There is a growing appreciation that language is more than words and their meanings. It involves all kinds of things like tone of voice, gesture and gaze. We can now add one additional subtle cue: the shapes of letters.
