The iconic potential of sign languages suggests that the establishment of a conventionalized set of form-meaning pairings should be relatively easy. However, even an iconic form has to be interpreted correctly for it to conventionalize. In sign languages, spatial modulations are used to indicate real spatial relationships (locative) and grammatical relations. The former is a more-or-less direct representation of how things are situated with respect to each other. Grammatical space, in contrast, is more abstract. As such, the former would seem to be more interpretable than the latter, and so on the face of it, should be more likely to conventionalize in a new sign language. But in at least one emerging sign language the grammatical use of space is conventionalizing first. We argue that this is due to the grammatical use of space being easier to understand correctly, using data from four experiments investigating hearing non-signers interpretation of spatially modulated gestures.

手语的标志性潜力表明，一套常规的形式-意义配对的建立应该相对容易。但是，即使是标志性的形式也必须正确解释才能使其习惯化。在手语中，空间调制用于指示实际的空间关系（位置）和语法关系。前者或多或少直接表示事物相对于彼此的位置。相反，语法空间更抽象。因此，前者似乎比后者更具可解释性，因此从表面上看，它应该更有可能以新的手语习惯化。但是在至少一种新兴的手语中，空间的语法用途是最先实现的。