Predicting whether the intended audience will be able to recognize the meaning of an icon or pictograph is not an easy task. Many icon recognition studies have been conducted in the past. However, their findings cannot be generalized to other icons that were not included in the study, which, we argue, is their main limitation. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive taxonomy of icons that is intended to enable the generalization of the findings of recognition studies. To accomplish this, we analyzed a sample of more than eight hundred icons according to three axes: lexical category, semantic category, and representation strategy. Three basic representation strategies were identified: visual similarity; semantic association; and arbitrary convention. These representation strategies are in agreement with the strategies identified in previous taxonomies. However, a greater number of subcategories of these strategies were identified. Our results also indicate that the lexical and semantic attributes of a concept influence the choice of representation strategy.

预测目标受众是否能够识别图标或象形文字的含义并非易事。过去已经进行了许多图标识别研究。然而，他们的发现不能推广到研究中未包括的其他图标，我们认为这是他们的主要局限性。在本文中，我们提出了一个全面的图标分类法，旨在使识别研究的结果能够泛化。为此，我们根据三个轴分析了八百多个图标的样本：词汇类别、语义类别和表示策略。确定了三种基本的表示策略：视觉相似性；语义关联；和任意约定。这些表示策略与先前分类法中确定的策略一致。但是，确定了这些策略的更多子类别。我们的结果还表明，概念的词汇和语义属性会影响表示策略的选择。