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Iconicity features prominently in manual communication systems, from cospeech gesture to fully-structured sign languages. Despite early reports to the contrary (Orlansky & Bonvillian, 1984), there is growing evidence that iconicity aides in the early acquisition of signed languages (Thompson et al., 2012), though older children benefit more (Magid & Pyers, 2017) and there may be different effects in second language learning (Ortega, 2017). Of course, iconicity is not limited to the gestural realm. Recent studies show that spoken languages contain many iconic elements, particularly in child speech (Monaghan et al., 2014; Perry et al., 2017). In sum: iconicity is prevalent in language, and may even be a driver of linguistic form (Dingemanse et al., 2015). Iconicity is important to discussions of the evolution of language because iconic communication could, in principle, be understood without a shared linguistic system (i.e., without language). “Gesture first” theories of language origins emphasize the importance of iconicity as a bridge to language, arguing that iconic gesture could have provided an advantage to human ancestors before the emergence of language (e.g., Zlatev, 2008; Arbib, 2015). These authors propose that iconic gesture in the form of pantomime formed a transitional stage in the evolution of symbolic communication, between the ability to imitate actions and the emergence of communicative conventions. This is a compelling story, but I argue that iconicity (especially pantomime) did not play a substantial role in language origins until well after the emergence of conventional systems. Despite the prevalence of iconic words and signs in modern languages, iconicity of the sort required by these theories is not a trivial matter— understanding and producing iconic gestures requires complex mental representation and sophisticated analogic reasoning. This may put it beyond reach of very young children and non-human primates, which raises questions 73

Iconicity and convention in the manual modality: Pantomime in language origins