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Language is often regarded as a de ning trait of our species, but what are its core properties? In 1960, Hockett published ‘The origin of speech’ enumerating 13 de- sign features presumed to be common to all languages, and which, taken to- gether, separate language from other communication systems. Here. we review which features still hold true in light of new evidence from cognitive science, lin- guistics, animal cognition, and anthropology, and demonstrate how a revised un- derstanding of language highlights three core aspects: that language is inherently multimodal and semiotically diverse; that it functions as a tool for se- mantic, pragmatic, and social inference, as well as facilitating categorization; and that the processes of interaction and transmission give rise to central design features of language. 

abstract A growing body of research shows that both signed and spoken languages display regular patterns of iconicity in their vocabularies. We compared iconicity in the lexicons of American Sign Language (ASL) and English by combining previously collected ratings of ASL signs (Caselli, Sevcikova Sehyr, Cohen-Goldberg, & Emmorey, 2017) and English words (Winter, Perlman, Perry, & Lupyan, 2017) with the use of data-driven semantic vectors derived from English. Our analyses show that models of spoken language lexical semantics drawn from large text corpora can be useful for predicting the iconicity of signs as well as words. Compared to English, ASL has a greater number of regions of semantic space with concentrations of highly iconic vocabulary. There was an overall negative relationship between semantic density and the iconicity of both English words and ASL signs. This negative relationship disappeared for highly iconic signs, suggesting that iconic forms may be more easily discriminable in ASL than in English. Our findings contribute to an increasingly detailed picture of how iconicity is distributed across different languages.