Data from: Iconicity can ground the creation of vocal symbols

Studies of gestural communication systems find that they originate from
spontaneously created iconic gestures. Yet, we know little about how
people create vocal communication systems, and many have suggested that
vocalizations do not afford iconicity beyond trivial instances of
onomatopoeia. It is unknown whether people can generate vocal
communication systems through a process of iconic creation similar to
gestural systems. Here, we examine the creation and development of a
rudimentary vocal symbol system in a laboratory setting. Pairs of
participants generated novel vocalizations for 18 different meanings in an
iterative ‘vocal’ charades communication game. The communicators quickly
converged on stable vocalizations, and naive listeners could correctly
infer their meanings in subsequent playback experiments. People's
ability to guess the meanings of these novel vocalizations was predicted
by how close the vocalization was to an iconic ‘meaning template’ we
derived from the production data. These results strongly suggest that the
meaningfulness of these vocalizations derived from iconicity. Our findings
illuminate a mechanism by which iconicity can ground the creation of vocal
symbols, analogous to the function of iconicity in gestural communication
systems.