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The view that words are arbitrary is a foundational assumption about language, used to set human languages apart from nonhuman communication. We present here a study of the alignment between the semantic and phonological structure (systematicity) of American Sign Language (ASL), and for comparison, two spoken languages—English and Spanish. Across all three languages, words that are semantically related are more likely to be phonologically related, highlighting systematic alignment between word form and word meaning. Critically, there is a significant effect of iconicity (a perceived physical resemblance between word form and word meaning) on this alignment: words are most likely to be phonologically related when they are semantically related and iconic. This phenomenon is particularly widespread in ASL: half of the signs in the ASL lexicon areiconicallyrelated to other signs, i.e., there is a nonarbitrary relationship between form and meaning that is shared across signs. Taken together, the results reveal that iconicity can act as a driving force behind the alignment between the semantic and phonological structure of spoken and signed languages, but languages may differ in the extent that iconicity structures the lexicon. Theories of language must account for iconicity as a possible organizing principle of the lexicon. 

Abstract ASL-LEX is a publicly available, large-scale lexical database for American Sign Language (ASL). We report on the expanded database (ASL-LEX 2.0) that contains 2,723 ASL signs. For each sign, ASL-LEX now includes a more detailed phonological description, phonological density and complexity measures, frequency ratings (from deaf signers), iconicity ratings (from hearing non-signers and deaf signers), transparency (“guessability”) ratings (from non-signers), sign and videoclip durations, lexical class, and more. We document the steps used to create ASL-LEX 2.0 and describe the distributional characteristics for sign properties across the lexicon and examine the relationships among lexical and phonological properties of signs. Correlation analyses revealed that frequent signs were less iconic and phonologically simpler than infrequent signs and iconic signs tended to be phonologically simpler than less iconic signs. The complete ASL-LEX dataset and supplementary materials are available at https://osf.io/zpha4/ and an interactive visualization of the entire lexicon can be accessed on the ASL-LEX page: http://asl-lex.org/.