Iconicity, the resemblance between the form of a word and its meaning, has effects on behavior in both communicative symbol development and language learning experiments. These results have invited speculation about iconicity being a key feature of the origins of language, yet the presence of iconicity in natural languages seems limited. In a diachronic study of language change, we investigated the extent to which iconicity is a stable property of vocabulary, alongside previously investigated psycholinguistic predictors of change. Analyzing 784 English words with data on their historical forms, we found that stable words are higher in iconicity, longer in length, and earlier acquired during development, but that the role of frequency and grammatical category may be less important than previously suggested. Iconicity is revealed as a feature of ultra‐conserved words and potentially also as a property of vocabulary early in the history of language origins.

中文翻译：

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标志性和历时语言变化

形象性，即词的形式与其意义之间的相似性，对交际符号发展和语言学习实验中的行为都有影响。这些结果引发了关于象似性是语言起源的一个关键特征的猜测，但在自然语言中象似性的存在似乎是有限的。在一项关于语言变化的历时研究中，我们调查了象似性在多大程度上是词汇的稳定属性，以及先前调查的心理语言学变化预测因素。通过对 784 个英语单词的历史形式数据进行分析，我们发现稳定词的象似性更高，长度更长，并且在发展过程中获得的更早，但频率和语法类别的作用可能没有之前提出的那么重要。