Editing Iconicity (section)

==Language acquisition==
It has been suggested that iconicity can be used in the teaching of languages. There are two ways this has been suggested. The first being “Horizontal-Iconicity” and the second being vowel magnitude relationships. Horizontal-Iconicity is the phenomenon of opposition of meaning and spelling. For example, in [[Egyptian language|Egyptian]] {{lang|egy|mer}}, which means right hand, and {{lang|egy|rem}}, which means left hand. Because people are more likely to remember things they have more [[mnemonic]] tags for, it is suggested that it may be helpful to point these things out in the teaching of language.<ref name="Croft 1978">Croft (1978)</ref>

===Vowel magnitude===
Vowel magnitude relationships suggest that, the larger the object, the more likely its name has open vowels such as {{IPAslink|ɒ}}, {{IPA|/eɪ/}}, and {{IPAslink|æ}}; the smaller the object, the more likely its name has closed vowel sounds such as {{IPAslink|iː}}, {{IPAslink|ʊ}}, and {{IPAc-en|j|uː}}. Open vowel sounds are also more likely to be associated with round shapes and dark or gloomy moods, where closed vowel sounds are more likely to be associated with pointed shapes and happy moods.<ref name="Croft 1978"/>

A test run by [[Edward Sapir|Sapir]] asked subjects to differentiate between two different sized tables using invented word pairs such as "mal" and "mil". He discovered a word containing {{IPA|[a]}} was at four times more likely to be judged as larger if paired with a word containing {{IPA|[i]}}. Nuckolls states: "Newman discovered that&nbsp;... as the tongue recedes in articulating vowels from the front to the back of the mouth, and as acoustic frequencies become lower, the vowels are judged to be larger and darker". Bentley and Varron (1933) ran tests asking subjects to differentiate between vowel sounds without providing them, beforehand, contrasting attributes (such as bright and dark.) They found only moderate success rates that decreased when vowel sounds were closer in tone. However, they still found that {{IPA|[a]}} sounds were judged larger or lower than {{IPA|[i]}} sounds.<ref name="Nuckolls 1999 230, 231, 246">{{cite journal |last=Nuckolls |first=Janis B. |title=The Case for Sound Symbolism |journal=Annual Review of Anthropology |year=1999 |volume=28 |pages=230–231, 246 |doi=10.1146/annurev.anthro.28.1.225}}</ref>

In [[Morphology (linguistics)|morphology]], examples from degree adjectives, such as long, longer, longest, show that the most extreme degree of length is iconically represented by the word with the greatest number of [[phoneme]]s. [[Roman Jakobson|Jakobson]] cites examples of word order mimicking the natural order of ideas. In fact, iconicity is now widely acknowledged to be a significant factor at many levels of linguistic structure.<ref name="Nuckolls 1999 230, 231, 246"/>