Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research has shown that repeated interactions cancause iconicity in signals to reduce. However, data from sev-eral recent studies has shown the opposite trend: an increase iniconicity as the result of repeated interactions. Here, we dis-cuss whether signals may become less or more iconic as a re-sult of the modality used to produce them. We review severalrecent experimental results before presenting new data frommulti-modal signals, where visual input creates audio feed-back. Our results show that the growth in iconicity presentin the audio information may come at a cost to iconicity inthe visual information. Our results have implications for howwe think about and measure iconicity in artificial signallingexperiments. Further, we discuss how iconicity in real worldspeech may stem from auditory, kinetic or visual information,but iconicity in these different modalities may conflict