Icono: a universal language that shows what it says

Abstract

This article lays out the foundation of a new language for easier written communication that is inherently reader-friendly and inherently international. Words usually consist of strings of sounds or squiggles whose meanings are merely a convention. In Icono , instead, they typically are strings of icons that illustrate what they stand for. “Train,” for example, is expressed with the icon of a train, “future” with the icon of a clock surrounded by a clockwise arrow, and “mammal” with the icons of a cow and a mouse—their combination’s meaning given by what they have in common. Moreover, Icono reveals sentence structure graphically before, rather than linguistically after, one begins reading. On smartphones and computers, writing icons can now be faster than writing alphabetic words. And using simple pictures as words helps those who struggle with conditions like dyslexia, aphasia, cerebral palsy, and autism with speech impairment. Because learning its pronunciation or phonetic spelling is optional rather than a prerequisite, and because it shows what it says, Icono is bound to be easier to learn to read—and then easier to read—than any other language, including our own.

Full text

Frontiers in Psychology 01 frontiersin.org
Icono: a universal language that
shows what it says
PeterKramer *
Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy
This article lays out the foundation of a new language for easier written
communication that is inherently reader-friendly and inherently international.
Words usually consist of strings of sounds or squiggles whose meanings are
merely a convention. In Icono, instead, they typically are strings of icons that
illustrate what they stand for. “Train,” for example, is expressed with the icon
of a train, “future” with the icon of a clock surrounded by a clockwise arrow,
and “mammal” with the icons of a cow and a mouse
—
their combination’s
meaning given by what they have in common. Moreover, Icono reveals sentence
structure graphically before, rather than linguistically after, one begins reading.
On smartphones and computers, writing icons can now be faster than writing
alphabetic words. And using simple pictures as words helps those who struggle
with conditions like dyslexia, aphasia, cerebral palsy, and autism with speech
impairment. Because learning its pronunciation or phonetic spelling is optional
rather than a prerequisite, and because it shows what it says, Icono is bound to
be easier to learn to read
—
and then easier to read
—
than any other language,
including our own.
KEYWORDS
icon, pictogram, Esperanto, auxiliary language, dyslexia, aphasia, cerebral palsy, autism
A picture is worth a thousand words. —International adage.
1. Introduction: stepping back to jump forward
1.1. Accommodating the writer
Good writers put readers rst, it is said. e evolution of writing, however, headed in the
opposite direction (Fischer, 2001; Coulmas, 2003). It started o quite well by letting little pictures
and tally marks become carriers of meaning. ese were either pictograms that illustrated the
concrete object, quantity, or action they referred to, or ideograms that visualized the abstract
idea that corresponded to their meaning. Over time, however, these hieroglyphs were exploited
increasingly oen for their pronunciation rather than their meaning. As hieroglyphs became
less important as carriers of meaning, people cut corners drawing them, and they were
simplied, reoriented, and transformed beyond recognition (see also Garrod et al., 2007).
Eventually they morphed into letters—carriers of pronunciation only. Letters are a lot easier to
write than hieroglyphs are to draw, a small set of them is enough, and reading the pronunciation
of familiar words makes us recall their meaning. Considering all these advantages, alphabets
and suchlike have been hailed as the pinnacle of the history of writing, or at least something
close to it (Fischer, 2001; Coulmas, 2003; Torrez et al., 2019; Amit et al., 2022; Morin, 2022).
OPEN ACCESS
EDITED BY
Christopher James Hand,
University of Glasgow, UnitedKingdom
REVIEWED BY
Marcel Schlechtweg,
University of Oldenburg, Germany
Dom Massaro,
University of California,
Santa Cruz, UnitedStates
*CORRESPONDENCE
Peter Kramer
peter.kramer@unipd.it
RECEIVED 21 January 2023
ACCEPTED 26 May 2023
PUBLISHED 28 July 2023
CITATION
Kramer P (2023) Icono: a universal language
that shows what it says.
Front. Psychol. 14:1149381.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1149381
COPYRIGHT
© 2023 Kramer. This is an open-access article
distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The
use, distribution or reproduction in other
forums is permitted, provided the original
author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are
credited and that the original publication in this
journal is cited, in accordance with accepted
academic practice. No use, distribution or
reproduction is permitted which does not
comply with these terms.
TYPE Hypothesis and Theory
PUBLISHED 28 July 2023
DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1149381

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e last, but only partial, holdout against this presumed progress
is Mandarin Chinese.
1
Chinese script consists of characters composed
of combinations of radicals—pictographic or ideographic root-words.
Although fascinating, rightfully lauded for their beauty, and the main
inspiration for the present article, these radicals and characters do not
illustrate their meaning as intuitively as they could. Among the most
intuitive are 口, 人, and 木, which represent “mouth,” “person,” and
“tree,” and none of them very much resemble the thing they represent.
is is a pity, because the worse a character illustrates its meaning, the
harder it is to learn (Soemer and Schwan, 2012; see also Bellezza, 1996).
Most Chinese characters carry only a very broad hint to their
meaning and—in compensation for this lack of precision—an
additional, presumed, but rather unreliable, hint to their pronunciation
(Sampson, 1985; Coulmas, 2003; Morin, 2022). Confusingly, even this
dubious hint to pronunciation is ultimately composed of radicals,
which illustrate their own meaning and not their own pronunciation.
Worse, typically the hints to the meaning and the pronunciation of
1 The Dongba script of the Chinese Naxi people is pictorial but of limited,
mostly religious, use (Nie and Yao, 2022).
complex characters are themselves simpler characters in their own
right with, respectively, either an unrelated pronunciation or an
unrelated meaning—a source of confusion for even the most uent
reader (see Section 1.3; O’Seaghdha and Marin, 1997; Zhou and
Marslen-Wilson, 1999a,b; Yeh etal., 2017).
Besides Chinese, several other languages have adopted Chinese
characters. Eventually, though, these characters were either augmented
(Japanese) or completely replaced (Vietnamese and, for the most part,
also Korean) with phonetic tokens. Even in China itself, to combat
illiteracy, former chairman Mao Zedong pushed for the replacement
of Chinese script with Pinyin—“spell sound,” an alphabetic version of
Chinese (Fischer, 2001; Mullaney, 2017). In the end, the Chinese kept
their characters, but in mainland China, they were simplied.2
Recently, in a far-reaching twist of fate, Pinyin has become quite
popular aer all, but not as a replacement of Chinese characters but as
input for smartphone apps and word processors that instantly convert
Pinyin into either simplied or traditional Chinese characters
(Mullaney, 2017, 2021). Using Pinyin, as explained later, one can now
write Chinese characters faster than one can spell out alphabetic
words. And interestingly, with the same speed and ease, Pinyin can
now also beused to write modern emojis.
1.2. Accommodating the reader
Now that technology allows us to separate writing’s input (e.g.,
Pinyin) from its output (e.g., Chinese characters or emojis), the
question arises which output serves readers best: one that expresses
the pronunciation of words or one that oers hints to their meaning.
e sounds of words like dripple, giggle, or clap remind one of their
meaning and people learn and understand such “onomatopoeic”
words faster than other ones (Perniss et al., 2010; Lupyan and Winter,
2018; Röders et al., 2022). Far more oen, however, the pronunciation
of words does not, on its own, help bring their meanings to mind
(Perniss et al., 2010; Lupyan and Winter, 2018). It does so only if one
has previously learned the rather arbitrary, and thus nonintuitive,
association between the two. If words consist of icons, however, then
as long as these icons oer at least a slight hint to word meaning, they
are already more helpful to readers than are letters.
Indeed, millennia-old pictograms of a sh and a bird are still
easy to read, even if one does not know the language of the ancient
scribes that wrote them (Figure1). Yet, in the regions where these
pictograms were written, people now use more abstract Arabic or
Chinese scripts, and most Arabs cannot read the Chinese script,
most Chinese cannot read the Arabic script, and most of the rest of
the world can read neither. Moreover, even uent readers still tend
to understand, recognize, and recall better and faster what pictures
depict than what the corresponding words in these readers’ own
language mean (Kirkpatrick, 1894; Jenkins etal., 1967; Paivio and
Csapo, 1973; Childers and Houston, 1984; Stenberg, 2006; Hockley,
2008; Quinlan etal., 2010; Curran and Doyle, 2011; Hockley and
Bancro, 2011; Carpenter and Olson, 2012; Rosenfeld etal., 2015;
2 In the present article, because they are a little closer to their pictorial origin,
traditional rather than simplified characters are used, like in Taiwan, Hong-Kong,
Macao, and Japan.
FIGURE1
Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Chinese hieroglyphs (Maspero, 1916;
image in the public domain: https://archive.org/). Within each panel,
the top row represents early, more concrete hieroglyphs, and
subsequent rows later, more abstract versions of them. The Egyptian
hieroglyphs eventually evolved into our present-day letters (Fischer,
2001; Coulmas, 2003; Nawar, 2020).

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Baadte and Meinhardt-Injac, 2019; see also Cherry etal., 2008; Ally
et al., 2009; Embree et al., 2012). is picture superiority eect
suggests that, at least for concrete words that are easy to illustrate, an
input language consisting of letters may beconvenient enough for
writers but an output language consisting of pictures is more helpful
to readers.
e picture superiority eect does not always hold. When
pictures are unclear, too detailed, or when photos or line drawings
are used, which can betime consuming for the brain to process
(Bühler, 2021), the very opposite eect can emerge (Snodgrass and
McCullough, 1986; Amrhein etal., 2002; Whitehouse etal., 2006;
Boldini etal., 2007; Defeyter etal., 2009; Hung etal., 2016). In fact,
the images that are the easiest to digest are uncluttered, leave out
irrelevant details, and only show the gist of a concept (Bühler,
2021)—that is, they are icons like those on road signs and on
dashboards in cars and cockpits (McDougall etal., 2006; Lee etal.,
2019; Shen etal., 2020; Friedrich etal., 2022).
e invention of hieroglyphs and Chinese characters depended
on the creativity of small groups of scribes that operated locally with
limited tools. By modern standards, quality was poor, and over time,
writers were served better and better but readers worse and worse
(Figure1; Xiao and Treiman, 2012). Today, however, the design of
the contemporary equivalents of pictograms and ideograms (emojis
and more sleek, minimalist icons) engages talent from around the
world, is facilitated by extremely exible soware, and is increasingly
guided by ergonomic research focused on the reader rather than the
writer (Bühler, 2021). People not only process such icons faster than
alphabetic words but also nd them more engaging (McDougall
et al., 2016; Yangandul et al., 2018). Unsurprisingly, icons now
abound in messages, manuals, advertisements, and on packaging,
user interfaces, letterheads, and more (Katz et al., 2006;
Koutsourelakis and Chorianopoulos, 2010; Andrews etal., 2011;
Boelhouwer etal., 2013; Gawne and McCulloch, 2019; Sletvold etal.,
2020; Liu etal., 2021; Prasetyo etal., 2021; Wu etal., 2022). What
these icons depict is also not just concrete objects anymore; with
great ingenuity, ever more abstract concepts are being visualized too.
3
In a sign of the times, artist Bing (2013) recently managed to write
an entire book using, instead of words, only icons. It was craed with
diculty, no doubt. Yet even without learning any vocabulary, it can
be read—or at least deciphered—by anyone, regardless of their
linguistic background. Meanwhile, a number of scholars, scientists,
artists, and ordinary citizens (Okrent, 2010) are using pictures as
words in more systematic ways than does Bing. Some of them have
articially constructed pictorial “languages” (Nawar, 2020; Bühler,
2021), including Pictoperanto (Gros, 2011), iConji (Nawar, 2020)
4
, Tok i
Pona (Lang, 2014), Minspeak (Baker, 1982), Picture Exchange
Communication System or PECS (Frost, 2002; see also Lancioni etal.,
2007; Almurashi etal., 2022), Blissymbolics or Semantography (Bliss,
1978; Jennische and Zetterlund, 2015)
5
, Ikon (Meloni etal., 2022),
Nobel (Randic, 2019), aUI (Weilgart, 1979), IconText (Beardon, 1995),
and Isotype (Neurath, 2010; Burke, 2013).
Of these modern pictorial languages, the oldest is Isotype, which
experienced its heyday in the rst half of the 20th century. Its icons
3 thenounproject.com
4 http://www.iconji.com/
5 www.blissymbolics.org
set the standard with their exceptionally ergonomic and artistic
design. Most of the other iconic languages are inspiring in their own
ways too. Still, as languages, they do have major shortcomings. First,
some use icons that are almost abstract symbols, which makes them
relatively hard to learn (Toki Pona, Blissymbolics, Nobel, aUI). ey
are easy to write by hand, but this activity is almost a thing of past.
Second, some use overly colorful or cluttered icons (iConji, PECS,
Minspeak, Ikon), which may appeal to children but makes these
icons harder for the brain to process (Bühler, 2021). ird, most rely
on a set of root words that must be combined to get additional
words, but because this set is typically quite small, the combinations
tend to become unwieldly (Okrent, 2010). Fourth, most are vague
about how they can beboth precise and concise (Okrent, 2010;
Morin, 2022). On electronic devices, IconText does deal with this
problem, and lets the reader go back and forth between dierent
levels of detail in the same passage. Fih, some have a rather limited
scope, like mostly visualizing social and economic statistics
(Isotype), exploring a Taoist worldview (Toki Pona), or
communicating with people who cannot speak, write, or read
(Blissymbolics, PECS, Minspeak). And sixth, none has a grammar
that is well-dened or comprehensive enough for sophisticated use
(Okrent, 2010; Morin, 2022).
1.3. The rebus principle accommodates
writers, not readers
Early in the history of writing, before they started cutting corners
with their drawing of hieroglyphs, ancient scribes made things easy
on themselves by recycling old pictorial words to make new ones. As
is still the case in modern Chinese, these new words oen consisted
in two simpler words, one with a relevant meaning but an irrelevant
pronunciation (henceforth: meaning component) and one with a
relevant pronunciation but an irrelevant meaning (henceforth:
pronunciation component). Readers were expected to ignore these
components’ irrelevant aspects. A study of Chinese readers, however,
shows this is easier said than done (Yeh et al., 2017; see also
O’Seaghdha and Marin, 1997; Zhou and Marslen-Wilson, 1999a,b;
Yeh and Li, 2004; Chen and Yeh, 2017).
e study consisted of several “Stroop” experiments and presented
colored Chinese characters (Yeh etal., 2017). As is typical in such
experiments, participants were to name the color of these characters
but ignore their meaning and pronunciation. Occasionally, however,
a character was presented whose pronunciation component’s
irrelevant meaning was associated with a color, and sometimes this
color did not match the character’s color. One of these characters, for
example, was “guess,” 猜, presented in yellow, which has a
pronunciation component that means “cyan,” 青. Another was “pity,”
恤, also presented in yellow, which has a pronunciation component
that means “blood,” 血. Blood is not a color; it is merely associated
with one. Nonetheless, in both cases the irrelevant meaning of the
pronunciation component put the participants on the wrong foot and
slowed down their ability to name the color of the characters (here the
color yellow).
e recycling of existing pictorial words to represent the sound,
but not the meaning, of new pictorial words is known as the rebus
principle. Ancient Sumerian, ancient Egyptian, and ancient Chinese
all made use of it and modern Chinese still does. Across the world,

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however, words with the same meaning oen sound dierent. us,
languages that use the rebus principle are never inherently
international. Moreover, because the rebus principle—as shown
above—implants relevant but also irrelevant and potentially
misleading associations in readers’ minds, languages that use the
rebus principle are also never inherently reader-friendly. Unlike
natural pictorial languages, therefore, neither Icono, nor any of the
pictorial articial languages mentioned earlier, make use of the
rebus principle.
In contrast, the recycling of existing pictorial words to represent
the meaning, rather than the sound, of new pictorial words can
beuseful. Chinese, for example, uses a square, 口, as a pictogram of a
mouth to express the word “mouth” but recycles this square, in
reduced size, in speech-related words like 詞, 句, and 信, which,
respectively, mean “word,” “sentence,” and “letter.” Unfortunately, the
Chinese words that have a pictogram in common oen do not have
any sounds in common. In Icono’s own bespoke pronunciation (see
Supplementary material), icons are assigned a pronunciation, the
pronunciation of words is dictated by that of their constituent icons,
and words that share an icon also share the sound associated with it
in their respective pronunciations.
1.4. Overview
Now, I lay out the foundation of Icono—a novel, icon-based
language that remedies the downsides of both ancient and modern
pictorial languages. e icons used for this endeavor have been
obtained from artists from across the globe.6,7 I will show that, with
such icons, Icono can in principle match the expressive power of
Chinese—enough, that is, not just for informal messages but also for
legal, literary, and academic communication. Section 2 lays out the
ideas behind Icono’s vocabulary (Section 2.1) and sentence structure
(Section 2.2); Section 3 describes two ecient ways to write Icono;
Section 4 discusses the potential benets of Icono for people with
special needs, like those with dyslexia, aphasia, cerebral palsy, and
autism with speech impairment; and Section 5 explains how Icono can
become a success despite the fact that Esperanto and all its competitors
have failed.
Icono is bound to make written communication particularly easy,
both within and especially across borders, for mainly three reasons.
First, like the languages of logic and mathematics, and unlike such
languages as English or Esperanto (Zamenhof, 1909), Icono can
be used for reading and writing even if one never learns its
pronunciation or phonetic spelling (for those, see
Supplementary material). Second, unlike such languages as English or
Esperanto, but also unlike those of logic and mathematics, almost all
of Icono’s words illustrate their own meaning. Some of these
illustrations are self-evident, the meaning of others has to belearned,
but none are arbitrary: they all function as visual mnemonics to aid
recall (see also Chang etal., 2022; Weerasinghe etal., 2022). And third,
unlike that of any other language, Icono’s sentence structure is revealed
when it is most helpful: before, rather than aer, one begins reading.
6 https://osf.io/yrb49/
7 https://thenounproject.com
2. The nuts and bolts of Icono
2.1. Words that illustrate their meaning
2.1.1. Combining concepts
e simplest words in Icono consist of a single icon with a
prototypical illustration of its meaning (Rosch et al., 1976; see also
Wittgenstein, 2009 but cf. Edwards et al., 2022). Writers, for example,
can opt to write the word “bird” with a single icon of an average-
looking bird (Figure 2A).
Still, whereas words that consist of a single icon are just ne in
some contexts, in others they may be ambiguous or suggest a
narrower meaning than intended (see also Lupyan and Winter,
2018). To solve the problem, just like Chinese characters combine
pictograms and ideograms (radicals), Icono combines icons. A
synonym for “bird,” for example, is obtained by putting together an
icon of a hummingbird and an icon of an emu—their combination’s
meaning given by what they have in common. is icon combination
does not reveal its meaning quite as readily as does a prototype-icon
but is still easy to learn and tells us that a generic bird is meant, not
any specic species. Various natural languages, including Sanskrit
and Greek, also combine pairs of relatively concrete words (here
“hummingbird” and “emu”) to obtain more abstract ones (here
“bird”). (Such pairs are called dvandva compounds, aer the Sanskrit
word for “pair”: dvandva, .)
In Icono, the core of a word is predened and xed. Yet, like in
Chinese to some extent, but unlike in most other languages, writers
can always prolong and oen shorten a word to make it, respectively,
less ambiguous or more concise. So, for extra clarity, writers can
choose to add an extra icon of, say, a duck or a swan to those of a
hummingbird and an emu to further drive home “bird” is meant
(Figure2A). Once the reader can beassumed to have gotten the
message, the extra icon can then bedropped again.
e icons that make up a word in Icono need not beindependent
instances of the concept this word expresses. ey can also
complement each other. For example, the combination of the icons of
a grabbing hand and a set of tools expresses the word “use” (Figure2B).
Alternatively, borrowing from Sumerian and ancient Egyptian, one
can use a “determinative”—a representation of a word’s broader
semantic category (Fischer, 2001; Coulmas, 2003; Nawar, 2020). For
example, to express the meaning of words having to do with
judgments, Icono uses an icon of a gavel (a judge’s wooden hammer).
To this gavel icon, Icono then adds an icon that depicts wood for
“gavel,” person for “judge,” house for “court of law,” speech blurb for
“judgment, claim, or statement,” and so on (Figure2C). A speech
blurb indicates relevance to language and can as such beused in other
words too. For example, in Chinese, nouns are called “name words,”
名詞, and in Icono, considering that names are used as identity labels,
“noun” is expressed with the icons of an identity card plus a speech
blurb (Figure2D). Verbs, in Chinese, are called “action words,” 動詞,
and in Icono, “verb” is expressed with the icons of an active person (a
runner) plus, again, a speech blurb (Figure2D).
2.1.2. Comparing and contrasting concepts
Unlike any other language, Icono not only uses positive hints to
word meaning, expressed with black icons on a white background, but
also negative ones, expressed with white icons on a black background.
If more clarity is needed to express the concept of a goose, for example,

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one can add to its black-on-white icon an additional white-on-black
one of a duck or a swan (Figure 2E). is would signal that a goose is
meant, not a similar-looking duck or swan. Likewise, a word like
“mammal” can be expressed with two black-on-white icons of two
radically dierent instances of this concept, like a cow and a mouse.
Yet, one can also choose a synonym consisting of the black-on-white
icons of a cow and a whale, or a cow and a bat, and then—for extra
clarity—temporarily add a white-on-black icon of a sh or a bird
(Figure 2E).
e Chinese word for “mammal,” 哺乳動物, is its own denition
and means “breast-feeding animal.” e denition is clear, but the
word is two characters longer than most Chinese words and contains
11 pictograms and ideograms (radicals). At a normal reading speed,
this is rather a lot for readers to digest. Especially the earliest designers
of articial languages also oen used words that dened themselves
in terms of root words. e result proved unwieldly (Okrent, 2010). A
word in Icono therefore typically consists of icons that oer key
mnemonics to this word’s meaning but not a full-edged denition.
is way Icono can express “mammal” with just two icons, or
temporarily with one or two additional ones, rather than with almost
a dozen.
2.1.3. Keeping words short and simple
An important question is whether Icono’s vocabulary could ever
rival that of a full-edged, natural language like Chinese, and how
many icons per word would be needed in this case. Most Chinese
words consist of two characters, and each character usually consists of
substantially fewer than 10 radicals. Chinese words thus typically
consist of at most 2 × 10 = 20 pictograms and ideograms. Chinese
restricts its choice of radicals to only some 200. Suppose, for
argument’s sake, that Icono replaced each radical with a modern icon
and used no other icons. In this case, to rival the expressive power of
Chinese, it could need up to 20 icons per word. Unlike Chinese, of
each icon, Icono uses both a white-on-black (positive) version and a
FIGURE2
Word construction in Icono. Within each panel, iconic words are shown along with their English translations. Icons in white on black represent the
negated versions of identical ones in black on white—a black duck on a white background means “duck,” a white duck on a black background “not
duck.” Icono is rich in synonyms; note, for example, in panel E, the five dierent ways in which one can express the word “mammal.” For names that do
not have any meaning, icons can beused that instead illustrate their own pronunciation, like those in panel H pronounced as “ee” and “ah,”
(respectively, /i/ and /a/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet; for more, see Supplementary material). Note that “creature” is defined as any kind of
microbe or animal, and “lifeform” as any kind of creature or plant. (Icons reproduced with permission from thenounproject.com; acknowledgments
and links: https://osf.io/yrb49/).

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black-on-white (negative) one. Taking this into account, Icono could
need up to 10 icons per word rather than 20. Importantly, however,
Icono allows the use of many more than just 200 icons. Hence, if it
adopted, say, 1,000 dierent ones, it could in principle get by with on
average only 10/(1000/200) = 2 icons per word. Indeed, in Chinese, the
word for “rest,” 休, is expressed with two radicals, which, respectively,
represent a person, 人, and a tree, 木 (think of person leaning against
a tree). In Icono, instead, a single icon of a resting person can suce
on its own (Figure 2F). Of course, if more clarity is needed, an
additional icon can always be added, like a positive icon that expresses
rest in a dierent way or a negative icon of work (Figure 2F).
Typically, the more abstract a concept, the more icons are needed
to express it unambiguously. “Mammal,” for example, can beexpressed
with the combination of the icons of a cow and a mouse, but “cow”
and “mouse” themselves each require only one icon (Figure2E). Still,
once the reader has been presented with a long version of an iconic
word, and can beassumed to have understood it, this word can
subsequently oen beabbreviated without much loss in clarity. e
Chinese word for “train,” 火車, for example, translates to “re vehicle”
(think of a coal-red steam engine). Yet once the reader can
beassumed to have understood that a train is meant, and not a car or
a bus, the Chinese oen abbreviate “re vehicle” to just “vehicle.”
Context may also help: when someone looks at a departing train and
says “vehicle is leaving,” it is clear that a re vehicle is meant, no need
to spell this out. Of course, Icono is not limited to some 200 radicals
and can express the concept of a train more concisely, not with a re-
pictogram plus a vehicle-pictogram, but simply with a single icon of a
train (Figure2G). Still, if one wishes, one can initially use the black-
on-white icon of a modern train and a white-on-black one of a steam
engine (Figure2G) to signal that a modern train is meant rather than
just any kind of train. Subsequently, the icon of the modern train by
itself will do.
2.1.4. Dealing with meaningless names
In Icono, words typically illustrate their own meaning. Yet one
should be able to express proper names too, and these may not
necessarily have any meaning. Borrowing an idea from Korean (see
Supplementary material), one solution is to use icons that illustrate
their own pronunciation—that is, icons that refer to sounds and at the
same time also illustrate how to use the mouth to produce these
sounds (Figure 2H; Supplementary Figure S1). e problem is that
names that for some are easy to pronounce, for others are oen a
major tongue-twister. English speakers, for example, tend to ignore
the all-important intonation of Chinese names and Chinese speakers
struggle with the consonant clusters and unusual vowels of English. A
user-friendly international language, therefore, does not preserve the
original pronunciations of names but adjusts them so that they
become less susceptible to mispronunciation and miscommunication.
Given such problems, however, one could consider coining
meaningful alternatives to meaningless, or seemingly meaningless,
names. For most Chinese speakers, for example, my name “Peter
Kramer” is very hard to pronounce. Yet “Peter” derives from “rock”
and “Kramer” from “stall keeper,” and neither is dicult to depict with
icons that illustrate themselves and are easy to use worldwide
(Figure2J; for an etymology of names, see: www.behindthename.
com). My native e Netherlands is well known for its tulips,
windmills, and clogs. An alternative name for this country could thus
bean icon of the geographical contours of e Netherlands plus an
icon of a tulip, a windmill, or a clog (Figure2J). Likewise, “United
States of America” can beexpressed with an icon of the statue of
liberty plus an icon of the US’s contours or distinctive ag, and
“Venice” with the icons of a town, a winged lion, and a gondola
(Figure 2J). Elderly people in particular have trouble recalling
meaningless proper names (Evrard, 2002). is, then, may beanother
good reason to replace such meaningless names with meaningful ones.
To ensure that color names are printable in black and white and
readable by the colorblind, Icono expresses them with the icon of a
painter’s palette plus an icon of something associated with these
colors, like a snowman for “white,” cherries for “red,” a tree for “green,”
and a cart full of coal for “black” (Figure2I).
2.1.5. Dealing with abstract concepts
e icons whose meanings are easiest to learn from scratch are those
that are tightly related to the concrete everyday impressions and
experiences we have had since early childhood (Bühler, 2021; see also
Shen et al., 2020; Friedrich et al., 2022). Most of the icons in Figure 2 are
of this type. e more abstract the concepts that icons represent, the less
oen their representation approaches this ideal (but see Scicluna and
Strapparava, 2019). Some tokens are pictorial but nonetheless abstract.
e “heart” icon, for example, is widely understood to mean “love” but
neither depicts any emotion nor much resembles any physical heart.
Because its meaning is thus little more than a convention, it is strictly
speaking a symbol rather than an icon (Shen et al., 2020; Bühler, 2021).
Similarly, a speech blurb is a symbol but is widely understood to stand for
words or language (Figure 3H), and the location indicator (Figure 3C)
and OK gesture (Figure 3E) have become quite international symbols as
well. Following Bing (2013), until more intuitive alternatives become
available, Icono also uses such well known, icon-like, but nonetheless
quite abstract pictures (Figure 3).
Remarkably, although formal logic and mathematics are oen
deemed quintessentially abstract, versions of them already exist that
are to a large extent iconic rather than symbolic (for iconic logic, see
Roberts, 1973; Kauman, 2001; Shin, 2002; Dau, 2011; Peirce, 2020;
Peirce, 2021a,b; Bricken, 2023; Kramer, 2023; for iconic mathematics,
see Spencer Brown, 1969; Kauman, 1995; Bricken, 2019a,b; Bricken,
2021; Kramer, 2022).
It has, in fact, been argued that even the most abstract concepts,
including mathematical ones, are embodied—directly or indirectly
grounded (Barsalou etal., 2018; Borghi, 2022) in concrete physical
experiences or action preparations (Lako and Núñez, 2000; Gallese
and Lako, 2005; see also Fischer etal., 2021; Glenberg, 2021). Still,
the more abstract a concept, the more diverse the items or events
across which this concept generalizes (Del Maschio etal., 2021) and
the harder it is to visualize this concept with just a few icons (see also
Lupyan and Winter, 2018). For example, whereas the concept of a cow
generalizes over all cows, the concepts of mammal, creature, and
lifeform generalize not only over all cows but also over progressively
larger numbers of other species. Hence, whereas it expresses “cow”
with just a single icon, Icono uses two icons to express “mammal,”
three to express “creature,” and four to express “lifeform” (Figure2E).
Likewise, whereas the concept of running generalizes over many
physical actions, the concept of action generalizes over many more
and requires an extra icon (Figure2D). Particularly hard to illustrate
succinctly are concepts like “and,” “or,” “because,” “therefore,” which
apply to a great many extremely dierent situations. Exactly for these
kinds of concepts, mathematics and logic reserve abstract symbols.

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Because these are already widely used all around the world, Icono lets
pragmatism triumph over dogmatism, and adopts some of these
symbols too (see next section).
2.2. Sentences that reveal their structure
2.2.1. Structuring sentences graphically
For Icono to become a suitable world language, not only its words
but also its grammar must be easy to learn. For the most part, Chinese
uses vocabulary rather than grammar to distinguish plural from
singular, and present from future and past; and it uses neither
grammatical case (e.g., no distinction between “they” and “them”) nor
grammatical gender (e.g., no distinction between linguistically “male”
or “female” words). Icono would thus be relatively easy to learn if it
adopted Chinese grammar. e grammars of Austronesian languages
like Malay and Hawaiian would be excellent alternatives, and the
grammars of some non-pictorial, articial languages like Esperanto
are not too bad either.
For two reasons, however, Icono has its own grammar. First,
languages oen use conjugation, particles, or axes to express their
grammar. Yet, as a kind of training wheels, language-instruction
material oen uses graphical tools like highlighting, italics, and
boldface to distinguish grammatically distinct passages before they are
read. As such training wheels are quite helpful, Icono turns them into
a permanent feature of its script and forgoes the use of most linguistic
markers of grammar. us, unlike any other language, Icono reveals
the structure of its sentences graphically before, rather than
FIGURE3
Frequently used abstract words. Iconic words and their translations regarding (A) quantity; (B) past, present, future (tense), and completion (aspect);
(C) prepositions; (D) possibility and probability; (E) whether something is hearsay, a question, a plea, an exclamation, etc. (mood); (F,G) pronouns like
“he,” “she,” “this,” “that” and determiners like “this” and “that” but also “the,” “one,” “five” (nouns accompanied by determiners are placed between
brackets and multiple determiners are separated from one another with commas, but more about this later); and (H) language-related concepts. An
icon of a hand pointing to the right (G) means “to point” if used as a verb or as part of a pronoun, otherwise it means “right.” (Icons reproduced with
permission from thenounproject.com; acknowledgments and links: https://osf.io/yrb49/).

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linguistically aer, one begins reading. As a side eect, Icono need not
constrain word order much and writers can adjust this order either to
what they are accustomed to in their native language, to what they
deem most important, or to what burdens readers the least (Hahn and
Xu, 2022). Second, although the grammars of languages like Chinese,
Malay, and Hawaiian are relatively simple, without sacricing
functionality, they could besimpler. e same is true for the Indo-
European-style grammars of articial languages like Esperanto.
2.2.2. Separating, organizing, and connecting
words
Like English words, Chinese characters are separated from each other
by a little bit of space. is was good enough in ancient times, when one
character was one word (Fischer, 2001). Now, however, Chinese words
oen consist of two characters and sometimes more, and there is nothing
that separates them from each other. Modern Chinese words must thus
be recognized before they can be distinguished. Icono’s words, instead, are
visibly separated from each other by either a vertical bar (Figures 4B–F)
or a punctuation mark (shown later) and can thus be distinguished before
they are recognized.
Sentences typically have up to three major parts that, in most
languages, are known as subject (e.g., “he loves her”), verb (e.g., “he
loves her”), and either object (e.g., “he loves her”) or subject
complement (e.g., “he is a man” or “he is tall”)—the subject
complement, unlike the object, oers information about the subject.
To ease parsing, Icono divides its sentences into these three parts too
and places above them, respectively, a dotted, a continuous, and a
dashed line (Figure4).
Verbs typically connect subjects to objects or complements.
Especially in Austronesian languages like Malay, however, the verb “to
be” is oen omitted, and “he is big” and “he is a man,” for example,
simply become “he big” and “he man.” Icono embraces such economy
of words (Figure4B). Still, whether stated explicitly or implicitly, “to
be” is ambiguous; it can mean “to beequal to” but also “to bea subset
FIGURE4
Separating and connecting words. (A) Mathematical and iconic vocabulary used in the panels below, plus some associated words. Because whales are
discussed in panels (B–E), the word “mammal” is expressed with the icons of a cow and a whale rather than a cow and a mouse (Figure2E), but either
alternative is fine to use. (B–F) By default, with the exception of determiners like “a,” “the,” “some,” words are separated from each other by vertical
bars. Each sentence’s subject, verb, and object or subject complement is placed underneath, respectively, a dotted, a continuous, and a dashed line.
(B) Where possible, the verb “to be” is omitted. (C–E) Where it is not omitted, “to be” is translated with logical or mathematical symbols. (D) Icono’s
version of “Paola” reflects the fact that this name derives from Latin for “small.” (C–D) Loose English translations are given in regular font, literal ones in
italics. (E) Words can beclarified by adding negative (white-on-black) icons to them. The first two lines are thus synonymous; the first is more concise,
the second less ambiguous. Abutting icons form a single word; those separated by a vertical bar or punctuation mark belong to dierent words
(compare lines 2 and 3). (F) Word order in Icono is relatively free. There is no need for passive sentences and no need to use words like “by” to express
them. (Icons reproduced with permission from thenounproject.com; acknowledgments and links: https://osf.io/yrb49/).

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of.” “Roosters are male chickens,” for example, is interpreted to mean
“roosters equal male chickens” but “whales are mammals” is
interpreted to mean “whales are a subset of mammals.” Hence, where
more clarity is needed, Icono translates “to be” with the help of logical
or mathematical symbols representing logical or set relationships like
“imply,” “is a subset of,” “intersects” and so on (Figures4C–E). In
Icono, these logical and set relationships are interchangeable; “being
a whale implies being a mammal,” for example, means the same thing
in Icono as “whales are a subset of mammals” (Figure 4C). As
alternatives to the verb “to be,” Icono oers iconic versions of so called
“modal” words like “may,” “might,” “could,” “must” (Figure5).
In English, the connectives “and” and “or” are ambiguous too. For
example, “Whales are mammals and aquatic animals” amounts to
saying, “whales are mammals that are aquatic animals,” but “cars and
trains are vehicles” is not equivalent to saying, “cars that are trains are
vehicles.” Similarly, with “chickens are hens or roosters” wemay mean
“chickens are hens or roosters but not both,” yet weusually do not
consider “Paola is a writer or a psychologist” false if Paola is both a
writer and a psychologist. Icono also uses set notation to express and
distinguish the former exclusive-or and the latter inclusive-or
(Figure4D). For attempts to exorcize all syntactic and all semantic
ambiguity, see, respectively, the non-pictorial articial languages of
Lojban (Sampson, 1999; Cowan, 2015; www.lojban.org) and Ithkuil
(Quijada, 2011). For a discussion of why, however, such extremism
becomes unwieldly, see Okrent (2010) and Garvía and Soto (2015).
2.2.3. Modifying words
Nouns and verbs can be modied by adjectives and adverbs. In
Icono, to graphically distinguish the modier from the modied, the
modied is placed between brackets and the modier either precedes
or follows it, outside these brackets (Figure 6). e brackets are used
in a way similar to those in mathematical functions like f(x): nouns
and verbs take the place of the variable x, adjectives and adverbs of the
function f, and the resulting modied nouns and verbs of f(x) as
a whole.
Modiers can sometimes modify words that, for the sake of
brevity, are not explicitly stated. For example, “some swans are white”
is short for something like “some swans are white creatures.” In Icono,
to ensure modiers of unstated words can berecognized as modiers,
and are not mistaken for nouns, they either precede or follow an
empty pair of brackets. us, “white” in Figure 6B needs to
be accompanied by brackets in line 2 but not line 3, and Icono
distinguishes, say, “whales are mammalian” from “whales are
mammals” (Figure6D).
e word “not” can modify words too. In this case, however, the
fore-and background colors of the modied words are reversed from
black on white to white on black (Figure 6F). To express double
FIGURE5
Expressing uncertainty. (A) Iconic vocabulary used in the panel below, plus some associated words. (B) The first sentence contains the verb “to be,” the
following ones so-called “modal” alternatives that express dierent degrees of uncertainty, like can, could, may, might, should, and must. (Icons
reproduced with permission from thenounproject.com; acknowledgments and links: https://osf.io/yrb49/).
FIGURE6
Modifying words. (A) Iconic vocabulary used in the panels below,
plus some associated words. (B) Modified words (nouns, verbs) are
placed between brackets; modifying ones (adjectives, adverbs)
precede or follow these bracketed words. (C) Dierent modifiers of
the same noun or verb are separated from one another by commas.
(B,D) Modifiers of omitted nouns or verbs either precede or follow
brackets enclosing an empty space. (E) An example of an adverb
(here “clearly”). (F) An example of negation and another of double
negation. (Icons reproduced with permission from thenounproject.
com; acknowledgments and links: https://osf.io/yrb49/).

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FIGURE7
Indicating time, completion, and intent. (A) Iconic vocabulary used in the panels below, plus some associated words. (B) Verb serialization in Icono but
not English (left and right) and verb contraction in English but not Icono (left). (C) Icono’s equivalents of grammatical tense (present, past, future) and
aspect (finished, ongoing). (D) Icono’s equivalents of questions and exclamations. (E) Icono’s equivalents of other kinds of grammatical mood.
(F) Icono’s expression of emphasis. (Icons reproduced with permission from thenounproject.com; acknowledgments and links: https://osf.io/yrb49/).
negation, like in “People do not dislike studying,” the verb “like” is
expressed in white on black and also preceded by the “forbidden” road
sign (Figure6F)—an alternative way of expressing “not.”
2.2.4. Indicating time, completion, and intent
To express that events happen simultaneously or in close
succession, English sometimes uses verb contractions like “stirfry,”
“kickstart,” and “forcefeed.” Like many Bantu, Austronesian, and
Papuan languages, Icono uses “verb serialization” instead, like in “He
stirs fries carrots” (Figure 7B, le) and in “She comes buys a computer”
(Figure 7B, right).
To varying degrees, many languages use grammar to express
whether events occurred in the past, take place now, or will happen in
the future (tense), and many more whether events have nished or are
ongoing (aspect). Icono enables the expression of both tense and
aspect (Figure7C), but unlike English, mandates neither. In Icono, for
example, like in Malay, “I work yesterday” is grammatical and
unambiguously refers to the past. Similarly, although “whales are
mammals” is a timeless truth, in English one must express it with the
present tense. In Icono, instead, one uses grammatical features like
tense only when they serve a purpose.
Sentences can beuttered for various reasons and bestatements,
questions, commands, suggestions and other kinds of so-called mood.
In English and many other languages, questions and exclamations end
with a dedicated punctuation mark. In Arabic, in contrast, questions
oen begin with a particle that informs readers upfront, rather than
retroactively, that they are questions. Icono follows this example for
not only questions but also all other expressions of mood
(Figures7D,E). Icono’s exclamation icon doubles as a kind of italics
and can also beused to emphasize words or passages (Figure7F).
2.2.5. Expressing spatial and temporal relations
Spatial and temporal relations are oen expressed with adpositions
(prepositions, postpositions) like in the English “on a ship,” “in a
h o u s e,” “through the air,” “before sunrise,” “aer nightfall,” and so on.
In Icono, like in English, all grammatical objects, except the direct and
indirect ones, are accompanied by an adposition. In “I bring you ve
dollars for the package,” the direct and indirect objects are, respectively,
“ve dollars” and “you.” To ensure the reader can tell which is which,
in Icono, like in English, Chinese, and many other languages, the
indirect object must always precede the direct one (Figure 8B). Like
adjectives and adverbs (Figures 6, 7), in Icono, adpositions either
precede or follow an expression between brackets (Figures 8B–E). e
same is true for determiners like “a,” “the,” “one,” “two,” “three”
(Figures 8F, 9D). Adpositions, adjectives, and determiners that operate
on the same expression are separated from one another by commas
(Figures 8C,D).
In abstract expressions in English like “on this matter,” “in matters like
these,” or “about this issue,” the correct choice of adposition can seem
rather arbitrary. To make things easier, whenever an adposition’s precise
meaning is unimportant, Icono uses the location icon and assigns it the
deliberately imprecise meaning of “somewhere at, around, in, on, under,
above, near, with, about, or through something or some location”
(Figure8E). In the same spirit, more than does English, Icono omits

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needless words. For example, in Icono, “I go to the bank” is grammatical
(Figure8F, line 1), but one can get the main point across more succinctly
with a Malay inspired “I to bank,” using neither verb nor denite article
(Figure 8F, line 2). In Figure 8E, the verb is clearly essential, in
Figures8B–D it could probably also beeliminated.
2.2.6. Dealing with quantity and identity
By themselves, the letters that make up words are just arbitrary
squiggles, and the same is true for the digits that make up numbers. In
Icono, instead, digits are represented with dots in dice-like
congurations (Figure 9B), with the number of dots indicating
numerical value (cardinality). Positive numbers are represented in
black-on-white, negative ones in white-on-black (for more on iconic
numbers and iconic mathematics, see Kramer, 2022). To be able to say
something like “eight minus ve equals three, not minus three,” the
word “not” is expressed with the “forbidden” road sign (Figure 9C, line
1; compare with Figure 6F, line 2). Other relationships between
numbers and quantities (Figure 9C) are expressed with the help of
mathematical symbols like “=” (equals), “<” (smaller than), and “>”
(larger than).
e number 1, expressed with a die containing one dot
(Figure9B), is used not only as a number but also as an indenite
article, meaning “a.” (Figure9D, line 1). As a denite article, which
refers to an already identied person or thing, Icono oers an icon of
something associated with identity: the ngerprint (Figure9D, line 1;
see also Figure3). By default, however, like in Russian, Chinese,
Malay, and many other languages, the denite article is not used.
In Icono, unlike in English, but just like in Malay and mostly
also Chinese, distinguishing singular and plural is optional rather
than mandatory. In English, “sheep” refers to one or more sheep,
but “car” to just one car and “cars” to more than one. In Icono, a
single icon of a sheep or a car means “one or more sheep” or “one
or more cars.” If desired, the singular form of a noun can
beexpressed by placing the iconic version of the number 1 before
or after this noun, and the plural form—inspired by Malay—by
duplicating any of the noun’s constituent icons (compare
Figure9D, lines 1 and 7). Duplication of any of the icons of an
adjective or verb, rather than of a noun, expresses a superlative,
like “biggest” or “fastest,” or a greater degree, like “much more”
or “much less” (Figure 9C). Proportions like “a quarter” are
expressed with small pie charts and vague quantities like “some”
or “approximately five” with the icons of an indistinct tally or the
gestures for big and small, which together mean “more or less”
(Figure9D).
2.2.7. Nesting sentences
Apparently, the Amazonian tribal language Pirahã avoids
embedding simple sentences within complex ones, or more
precisely, subclauses within main clauses (Futrell et al., 2016).
Like almost all other languages, Icono does allow such iterative
nesting. Icono’s subclauses may either lack (Figures 10B, 11B,C)
or include (Figure 12B) an explicitly stated subject, and may
either restrict (Figure 10B, lines 1, 2, 4) or leave unaffected
(Figure 10B, line 3) the meaning of the main clause. To
FIGURE8
Expressing spatial and temporal relations. (A) Iconic vocabulary used in the panels below, plus some associated words. An icon of a hand pointing to
the right means “to point” if used as a verb or in a pronoun, otherwise it means “right.” (B) Adpositions operate on expressions between brackets.
Indirect adpositions must precede direct ones (line 1), otherwise word order is relatively free (lines 2–3). (C) Sometimes an adposition can operate on
two nouns simultaneously (compare line 1 to lines 2 and 3). (C,D) Adpositions and adjectives operating on the same expression are separated from one
another by commas. (E) The location icon is used as an adposition with the deliberately imprecise meaning of “somewhere at, around, in, on, under,
above, near, with, about, or through something or some location.” (F) In Icono, both sentences are grammatical. (Icons reproduced with permission
from thenounproject.com; acknowledgments and links: https://osf.io/yrb49/).

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FIGURE9
Dealing with quantity and identity. (A) Iconic vocabulary used in the panels below, plus some associated words. (B) Iconic versions of the numbers 1
through 9, along with their negative equivalents, used in two related examples (see Kramer, 2022). (C) Comparing quantities with the help of
mathematical symbols and expressing degrees of quantities and superlatives with icon duplications. (D) Expressing the singular with the icon for the
number 1 (a die with one dot) and the plural with icon duplication (e.g., two car icons rather than one). Expressing precise as well as vague quantities
and using mini pie-charts to visualize proportions. Note that “some cars are green” translates to either “a subset of cars is a subset of green things” (i.e.,
being a member of this subset of cars implies being a member of the set of green things) or “the set of cars intersects the set of green things.” (Icons
reproduced with permission from thenounproject.com; acknowledgments and links: https://osf.io/yrb49/).
aid parsing, Icono uses punctuation, inserts some space
between distinct passages, or separates such passages graphically
by omitting grammatical markers above the words that
connect these passages, words like “and,” “or,” “therefore,”
“because.”
To avoid clutter, only the structure of subclauses is marked, not
that of the sentence that contains these subclauses. For example, in
“e woman who pays him is generous,” “e woman” is marked as a
subject (with a dotted line segment), “pays” as a verb (with a
continuous line segment), and “him” as an object (with a dashed line
segment). “e woman who pays him” in its entirety, however, is not
marked as the overarching sentence’s subject. To nonetheless ensure
the correct parsing of this overarching sentence, its main subject must,
by convention, always come before its main object—a constraint
generally observed in natural languages as well.
As mentioned, words like “and,” “or,” “implies” can express
relationships between sets. ese same words can also be used to
connect independent clauses to one another. To avoid ambiguity,
Icono reserves dierent logical symbols for these two usages (compare
Figure12 to previous gures).

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2.2.8. Being deliberately obscure, vague, and
indirect
To communicate effectively and efficiently, it is usually wise
to keep one’s sentences simple, concrete, and precise, and Icono is
particularly well suited for this goal. Still, not everything can
be expressed in concrete terms; being precise about details can
detract from a big picture; the same material can sometimes
be expressed more succinctly with a single complex sentence than
with several simpler ones; or, for social reasons, some may prefer
to avoid being upfront and to the point. Figures 10, 11, and 12
show how one can construct complex sentences in Icono;
Figure 13 how one can make them obscure, abstract, vague,
or indirect.
3. Technical issues
For the adoption of Icono to become practical, a few technical
requirements need to be satised, none of them out of reach with
existing means.
FIGURE10
Active sentences with subjectless subclauses. (A) Iconic vocabulary used in the panel below, plus some associated words. (In Figure6, “animal” was
defined with the icons of a cow and a bird. Here, a synonym is used: the icons of an insect and an elephant) (B) Active sentences, as opposed to
passive ones, containing a subclause without a subject. For each sentence in Icono, a loose English translation is provided, and in italics, a literal one. In
Icono, the overall structure of complex sentences is clarified by either spaces between coherent passages or the omission of line segments above
words that connect these passages, words like “who,” “that,” “and,” “equal.” Notice the subtle dierence in meaning between lines 1 and 2, and notice
that the subclause in line 3, unlike those elsewhere in this figure, does not restrict the meaning of the main clause. (Icons reproduced with permission
from thenounproject.com; acknowledgments and links: https://osf.io/yrb49/).
FIGURE11
Passive sentences with subjectless subclauses. (A) Iconic vocabulary used in the panel below, plus some associated words. (B) An active sentence in
Icono with a subclause (line 1, left) and various passive ones with a subclause (lines 2–4, left; lines 2 and 4, right) or without one (line 5, left; lines 1 and
3, right). Punctuation clarifies the overall structure of the sentences. Almost meaningless “dummy subjects,” like “it is thought,” are omitted. (C) A
sentence with a subclause that, in turn, contains another subclause. To aid the correct parsing of the sentence, a little bit of space is added after the
iconic translation of “the woman insists.” (Icons reproduced with permission from thenounproject.com; acknowledgments and links: https://osf.io/
yrb49/).

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FIGURE12
Sentences containing smaller sentences as subclauses. (A) Iconic vocabulary used in the panel below, plus some associated words. (B) Sentences
containing a subclause that has its own subject, and in the fourth sentence, an additional subclause without a subject. Highlighting can beused to help
the reader connect words that refer to the same thing. (Icons reproduced with permission from thenounproject.com; acknowledgments and links:
https://osf.io/yrb49/).
3.1. Building vocabulary
Icons have primarily been designed for commercial purposes
or informal messages. New ones will be necessary to meet the
needs in legal, literary, and academic communication. All icons
need to be available in the public domain and, like emojis, should
maintain their legibility when scaled down to approximately
text size.
3.2. Creating a dictionary
An electronic dictionary is needed that translates English and
other languages into Icono and vice versa. e translation of Icono
into alphabetic languages is not as straightforward as the converse,
because—like Chinese—Icono is not an alphabetic language, and its
vocabulary can therefore not be alphabetically organized. Devices
are already available, however, that scan Chinese text and translate
it into other languages.
8
Similar technology would come in handy
for Icono.
3.3. Writing icons by entering alphabetic
words
A popular and very fast way to write Chinese characters on electronic
devices featuring regular Qwerty keyboards is to choose Chinese as one’s
language and start typing in Pinyin. As soon as anything is entered, the
app presents a list of characters consistent with the writer’s input in order
8 http://www.waygoapp.com/
of frequency of use. e writer can already select the sought-aer
character from the list, which inserts this character immediately into the
text. Alternatively, the writer can add more input to shorten the list or
provide input for two characters, rather than one, to get a very short list
for their combination. Typically, with these options, words consisting of
characters are written faster than they can be spelled out in Pinyin, let
alone English (Mullaney, 2017).
Recent versions of Apple’s operating systems allow the use of
Pinyin to write not only Chinese characters but also emojis (Figure14).
If the Chinese characters and emojis were replaced with Icono’s icons,
such soware could beused to write in Icono (Figure14). As its input,
this soware should accept not only Pinyin but also words from the
writer’s own language. Receiving “mouse” or “elephant,” for example,
the app could immediately insert its iconic translation into the text.
Receiving “mammal,” it would instead present a list of possible iconic
translations, including the combination of the icons of a mouse and
an elephant, and insert the one the writer selects into the text. e
soware should oer both black-on-white icons and white-on-black
ones, and enable the addition of Icono’s grammatical marks (dotted,
continuous, and dashed lines and such).
3.4. Writing icons by selecting word
categories and subcategories
Writing Chinese characters does not necessarily require Pinyin or
any other pronunciation-based script. One can use the Cangjie writing
system, for example. Cangjie links character components to keyboard
keys, and writers can assemble characters by pressing appropriate key
sequences. Cangjie is harder to learn than Pinyin, but once learned, it
enables even faster writing (Fong and Minett, 2012).
Similarly, writing Icono need not necessarily require Pinyin, English
script, or any other pronunciation-based script either. In principle, one

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could use a modied version of an app that is currently in use to help
people communicate who have diculty speaking, writing, and reading
(Mirenda and Iacono, 2009; Ganz etal., 2012; Martínez-Santiago etal.,
2018; see also Almurashi etal., 2022). For purely practical reasons, these
apps organize words into categories and subcategories (for philosophical
reasons to do something similar, see Weilgart, 1979; Okrent, 2010;
Quijada, 2011; Lang, 2014; Wilkins, 2016). e writer selects a category
by touching its pictorial label; subcategories appear, and the writer selects
one; subsubcategories appear, and the writer selects one again; and nally
pictorial words appear, in order of frequency of use, and the writer makes
a nal selection (Figure15).
Suppose a vocabulary is built out of 1,000 dierent icons (with two
icons per word, enough to let Icono rival Chinese), and suppose that
these icons are organized into 5 categories that each contain 5
subcategories that, in turn, contain 5 subsubcategories (Figure15):
then, the nal subsubcategory would contain on average
1,000/5/5/5 = 8 icons. To write out one of them, the reader would thus
need to make three category selections (e.g., by typing in a number
between 1 and 5 three times) plus a nal selection of one icon out of
eight (e.g., by typing a number between 1 and 8). Writing in this way
would thus only require a numerical keyboard and no knowledge of
any language’s spelling or pronunciation.
If the available set of icons is limited to 1,000, some words that
could in principle beexpressed with a single icon must nonetheless
beexpressed with more than one. For example, although yaks are not
small, they are not listed among the large livestock in Figure 15.
FIGURE13
Using obscure language. (A–D) Obscure language (left) and associated vocabulary (right; for additional relevant vocabulary, see Figures2, 3). In each
panel on the left, an iconic sentence is presented along with its English translation, and then, within the same panel, it is repeated with the iconic and
English words matched up closely for easier comparison. (D) This passage, composed of two interrelated sentences, exemplifies two figures of speech:
hyperbole (Peter accuses Paul of being a devil) and irony (Peter accuses Paul while smiling). The passage also contains an example of “implicature”: it is
not explicitly said, only implied, that Peter played chess against Paul. Icono, incidentally, highlights in gray that “Peter” and “he” have the same referent.
(Icons reproduced with permission from thenounproject.com; acknowledgments and links: https://osf.io/yrb49/).
FIGURE14
Writing icons by entering alphabetic words. What is shown here is
what pops up on the screen if one uses a recent version of Apple’s
operating system, chooses Chinese as one’s language, and writes
“che” in Microsoft Word. The pop-up list consists of Chinese
characters consistent with the pronunciation “che” plus a car emoji—in
Chinese, “car” is pronounced as “che.” By typing in “2” right after “che,”
what is inserted into the document is not “che2” but the second item
of the list: a car emoji (here a car icon). The list of options then
disappears, and the next character or icon can bewritten. (The car
icon is reproduced with permission from the noun project.com;
acknowledgments and links: https://osf.io/yrb49/).

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FIGURE15
Writing icons by selecting word categories and subcategories. (A–D) Steps to go through to write the iconic version of the word “camel.” (A) Labels of
icon-categories are shown to the writer (English translations are omitted), and the writer selects one of the categories (here highlighted in white). (The
word “abstract” is visualized here with two icons of abstract paintings.) (B) Subcategory labels appear, and the writer makes another selection.
(C) Subsubcategory labels appear, and the writer makes yet another selection. (D) Now the icons appear that the writer can select and directly insert in
the text, like for example the “camel” icon. (Icons reproduced with permission from thenounproject.com; acknowledgments and links: https://osf.io/
yrb49/).
Hence, to write “yak” one has to use more than one icon—say, an icon
of a cow plus an icon of a mountain. e alternative, of course, is to
make more than 1,000 icons available. Doing so could force writers to
make more category selections for each icon they wish to write. In
compensation, however, the larger choice of icons would reduce the
average number of icons needed per word.
4. Users with special needs
4.1. Dyslexia
Roughly 5 to 10% of the population is unusually poor in reading
despite adequate schooling and having otherwise normal cognitive
and perceptual abilities (Shaywitz et al., 1990; Peterson and
Pennington, 2012; Ullman et al., 2020; Wagner et al., 2020). Such
dyslexia comes in various degrees of severity (Wagner et al., 2020) and
may have various unrelated causes but is most oen associated with
decits in relating tokens to sounds and in learning and understanding
grammar and parsing sentences (Melby-Lervåg et al., 2012; Peterson
and Pennington, 2012; Huettig et al., 2018; Ullman et al., 2020; West
et al., 2021; Li et al., 2022).
Icono is arguably better suited to dyslexics than are most other
languages. First, dyslexics have trouble naming pictures (Faust etal.,
2003) but no trouble recognizing what is depicted by either icons
(Berget etal., 2016) or pictures (Faust etal., 2003; Greenham etal.,
2003; Hanly and Vandenberg, 2010). Second, dyslexics have much
more trouble naming a picture of, say, a pineapple than linking this
picture to a dierent but semantically related picture of, say, a pair of
cherries rather than a pair of glasses (Johnson etal., 1996; Araújo
etal., 2016; see also Jednoróg etal., 2010; Jones etal., 2016). is
suggests that dyslexics not only have no trouble recognizing what
pictures depict but also no trouble categorizing them correctly as, say,
instances of fruit. ird, unlike in other languages, Icono’s sentence
structure is visible before one even begins reading, and this should
make parsing sentences easier for everyone, including dyslexics. And
fourth, unlike most other languages, Icono does not require that one
relates tokens to sounds or sounds to meanings, and hence it is
unaected by the typical decits dyslexics have in this domain (Reis
etal., 2020).
e ability of dyslexics to spontaneously pick up a grammar and
make it their own is sometimes investigated with strings of letters or
shapes whose order is constrained by an undisclosed set of rules—an
articial grammar (for a meta-analysis, see Van Witteloostuijn etal.,
2017). Most dyslexia research, however, focuses on dyslexics’ ability to
process natural grammars and natural language. It is typically assumed
that dyslexia is a personal problem of unfortunate individuals. Partly,
however, it is also a problem created by a society that uses a language
that is unfriendly to readers. e opaque spelling of English, for
example, has repeatedly been shown to hinder learning to read
(Ziegler and Goswami, 2005; Share, 2008; Caravolas etal., 2013) and
to exacerbate dyslexia (Landerl etal., 2013; Lallier etal., 2018; Reis
et al., 2020). And yet, to my knowledge, not a single study has
investigated whether dyslexics might nd it easier to learn to read, say,
Esperanto rather than their own natural, but irregular, language.
In any case, because iconic words engage the brain very dierently
than do alphabetic words or even Chinese characters, it might bea
good idea to investigate whether dyslexics could have less trouble
reading an icon-based articial language than an alphabetic or
character-based natural one. at this might indeed bethe case is

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suggested by research that shows that, more than others, dyslexics seek
to form a mental image of alphabetic words (Evans etal., 2022) and
have less trouble reading icons than reading alphabetic words (Berget
etal., 2016). at is, while searching for a verbally communicated
target item within a grid or list of items, dyslexics are slower than
non-dyslexics when these items contain written words but not when
they only contain icons. And whereas reading alphabetic trac
warnings impair concurrent simulated driving more in dyslexics than
in non-dyslexics, recognizing iconic road signs with the same message
does not (Roca etal., 2018). ese ndings suggest that dyslexics may
perhaps nd an icon-based language like Icono easier to read than an
alphabetic one. Modern technology can convert text into speech and
speech into text. Yet speech is eeting in a way text is not. Hence,
especially in case of complex formulations or subject matters, dyslexics
may oen still prefer to read and write rather than to listen and speak.
4.2. Stroke, autism, cerebral palsy,
cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer’s
Imagine you would like to ask for some water but have cerebral
palsy and thus poor control over muscles needed for speaking,
gesturing, and writing. Or imagine you know what you want and have
the muscle-control to express this, but a stroke and resulting aphasia
have selectively damaged the language centers in your brain, blocking
you from communicating eectively. Or imagine that because of mild
cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s you keep forgetting what words
mean but can still recognize pictures. Or imagine that, because of
severe autism, you can express yourself with little else than temper
tantrums. Some evidence suggests that in such cases pictorial
“languages” like Picture Exchange Communication System and
Blissymbolics can help bypass the decits and perhaps even ameliorate
them a little (Koul et al., 2005; Rajaram et al., 2012; Gilroy et al., 2017;
Brignell et al., 2018; Sevcik et al., 2018; Almurashi et al., 2022; see also
Cherry et al., 2008; Ally et al., 2009; Embree et al., 2012; but cf. Meza
et al., 2022). Typically, however, these languages use pictures that are
either more cluttered than necessary, like in the case of PECS, or more
abstract and symbol-like than necessary, like in the case of
Blissymbolics (Mizuko, 1987; Alant et al., 2005). Icono’s icons, instead,
avoid both unnecessary clutter and unnecessary abstraction; they
concretely depict only the gist of concepts and, compared to their
equivalents in PECS and Blissymbolics, should therefore be easier to
read, understand, learn, and use (Bühler, 2021).
5. Discussion: how can Icono succeed
where Esperanto failed
5.1. Esperanto without hope
Esperanto, created by L.L. Zamenhof (Zamenhof, 1909), is by far
the most popular articial language today, and by design, it is much
easier to learn and use than English or any other natural language
(Garvía and Soto, 2015; Lins, 2017; Goodall, 2023). Like English, it
uses the Roman alphabet, but unlike English, its spelling is transparent
rather than opaque and its grammar sophisticated but regular and
simple rather than irregular and needlessly complex. Esperanto
borrows its vocabulary exclusively from European languages (mainly
Latin ones) and its grammar mostly from Indo-European ones. Like
the Turkish and Finno-Ugric languages, however, Esperanto does
oen “glue” meaningful additions to existing words (agglutination).
“Esperanto” derives from the Latin “sperare” (to hope). Intended
was not so much hope for the language itself but hope it could bring
people together—at least on speaking terms. Unfortunately, hope for
Esperanto has been in short supply. In the 1920s, the language did gain
modest popularity, especially in Europe but also beyond (Garvía and
Soto, 2015; Lins, 2017; Goodall, 2023). At its peak, Esperanto was
promoted through some 60 Esperanto periodicals worldwide and
some 1,300 Esperanto clubs; the language was an elective or
mandatory subject in several schools in several dierent countries,
including the UnitedKingdom; and some children of Esperantists
even grew up with Esperanto as their mother tongue (Garvía and Soto,
2015; Lins, 2017). Yet, in the 1920s, the French Minister of Public
Instruction, Léon Bérard, promoted French as a world language and
prohibited the teaching of Esperanto in French schools (Garvía and
Soto, 2015; Lins, 2017). Bérard later became an ambassador for Vichy
France, which had a Nazi friendly regime, and Esperanto just so
happened to beinvented by a Jew (from Belostok, Russian Empire,
now Białystok Poland). Indeed, Hitler and Stalin and several of their
allies shut down all Esperanto organizations under their control and
persecuted, and in some cases executed, these organizations’ most
prominent leaders (Garvía and Soto, 2015; Lins, 2017).
Eventually Anglo-Saxon economic, cultural, and military expansion
pushed French to the side and English to the fore (Garvía and Soto, 2015;
Lins, 2017). Esperanto was le behind and never gained the political
backing that the broad acceptance of impactful linguistic innovations
typically requires (Fischer, 2001). English is now the world language, but
not because it is more suitable for this task than Esperanto. Indeed,
English is clearly far too hard for far too many. English prociency among
non-native speakers is deemed to behigh in only 31 out of 112 countries,
and tellingly, in many of these 31, people’s native language is closely related
to English.
9
Only three Asian countries perform well: Malaysia and
Singapore, both former British colonies, and the Philippines, a former
American colony. Even many of the world’s most educated scholars and
scientists, with access to translation soware and spelling and grammar
checkers, still need help with their English. Indeed, English editing
services are so much in demand that many scientic journals have
deemed it best to partner with them.
Language can be used not only to communicate but also to
bamboozle, divide, or dominate other people (Fischer, 2001). is may
be why bureaucrats, lawyers, and scientists use more jargon than
necessary, why medical doctors appear to oer a diagnosis when
merely labeling signs and symptoms in Greek or Latin, and indeed
why the world language is English rather than a language that is
independent of any economic, political, or military power. Facilitating
communication is also hardly the reason why Catholic Croats and
Orthodox Serbs embrace dierent scripts for their joint language of
Serbo-Croatian or why Hindu Indians and Muslim Indians and
Pakistani do so for their joint language of Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu).
Against the odds, the League of Nations once did come close to
adopting Esperanto. Partly due to French intervention, however, the
idea was eventually sidelined (Garvía and Soto, 2015). UNESCO’s
9 www.ef.com/epi

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1954 Montevideo Resolution ocially recognizes Esperanto as an
international auxiliary language (Resolution IV.4.422–4,224). Yet
neither the United Nations nor the European Union have adopted, as
an ocial language, either Esperanto or any other language specically
designed to make international communication easy, nor do they
promote the development of any such language.
5.2. Hope without Esperanto
Motivating people to learn a new language that is not
guaranteed to ever become widely used is a challenge. The official
adoption of a new language by a nation or large organization is
therefore of major help. This is, in fact, how Hebrew was brought
back from the dead (Okrent, 2010). Lack of political support may
thus go a long way to explain why neither Esperanto nor any of
its rivals ever became a success. Yet the fact that none of these
languages are as user-friendly as they could have been may very
well be the most important reason for their failure.
Six interrelated reasons suggest that Icono is more engaging
than Esperanto and much easier to learn, and should therefore
stand a better chance of success. First, in Icono, unlike in both
English and Esperanto, most words illustrate their own meaning
and are therefore inherently reader-friendly and inherently
international. Second, in Icono, unlike in both English and
Esperanto, most words consist of icons, and these are more
engaging and easier to interpret than their alphabetic equivalents.
Third, in Icono, unlike in both English and Esperanto, sentences
reveal their structure when it is most helpful: before, rather than
after, one begins reading. Fourth, Icono, unlike both English and
Esperanto, is not extra hard on the half of the world’s population
whose native language is not Indo-European
10
and may beof help
to people with conditions like dyslexia, aphasia, cerebral palsy,
and autism with speech impairment. Fifth, learning to read or
write in Icono, unlike in English or Esperanto, does not require
one to memorize the arbitrary associations between the meaning
of words and their pronunciation or spelling. And sixth, on smart
phones and computers, one can write iconic words faster than
one can spell out alphabetic ones.
5.3. Response to common objections
5.3.1. Icono cannot beat language imperialism
Some would have it that when the hegemony of English as the
world language ends, there will simply be a new political power
that imposes its language on us all. Consider, however, that the
world did let utility triumph over politics when it adopted one
single enduring universal language in which to conduct
mathematics and logic. Potentially crucial in its success may have
been that this language, unlike English and Esperanto, but just
like Icono, does not impose any particular pronunciation and
does not twist anyone’s tongue.
10 www.ethnologue.com/guides/largest-families
5.3.2. Icono cannot beat translation software
Some would have it that there is no need for an ecient universal
language anymore, as translation soware can help us out in
international correspondence. Consider, however, that even among
the world’s most educated, with access to very helpful soware,
English editing services are still in high demand. is suggest that
current translation soware falls far short of what is needed.
5.3.3. Icono is dead on arrival
Some would have it that articial universal languages have always
been dead on arrival and always will be. Indeed, in linguistics, even
the mere study of articial languages is frowned upon (Okrent, 2010).
Consider, however, that it was not a lack of success that caused
Esperanto’s demise but the very opposite. Esperanto did not die a
natural death: it was killed. Now that the assassins are gone, however,
there is no need for self-fullling fatalism.
5.3.4. Icono, if adopted, will become a mess
Some would have it that an articial language, once adopted, will
inevitably become irregular and messy itself, just like all natural ones
always have (Okrent, 2010). Consider, however, that given sucient
political will, the very opposite can also be achieved (Fischer, 2001;
Coulmas, 2003). is is why Turkish, for example, now has a
transparent script that can express all its vowels rather than just a
few—courtesy of Mustafa Kemal, “father of the Turks.” And this is also
why, each year, both North and South Koreans celebrate Korean
Alphabet Day, reminding themselves of the fact that they now have
the world’s rst and only iconic alphabet—courtesy of king Sejong the
Great (see Supplementary material).
5.3.5. Icono’s concrete icons can never express
abstract concepts
Some would have it that an iconic word can never express an abstract
concept because it is always tied to a concrete image (Lupyan and Winter,
2018). Consider, however, that in Icono one can for example use the icon
of a bird plus the icon of a rocket to express not “y like a bird” or “y like
a rocket” but “y” in the abstract. Likewise, partly thanks to ancient
Chinese scribes and especially modern icon designers (see
thenounproject.com), it is now possible to visualize numerous concepts
one might previously have deemed too abstract to depict, like in this
article the concepts of “use,” “lie,” “may,” “might,” “adverb,” “past tense,”
“year,” “opinion,” “interesting,” “anthropology,” “however,” and
many others.
5.3.6. Icono’s concrete icons are unhelpful to
readers
Some would have it that iconic words are unhelpful to
readers, because they are more easily confused with one another
than are non-iconic ones (Lupyan and Winter, 2018). “Iconic” is
meant very broadly by these critics, and words whose sound
reminds one of their meaning, for example, are also deemed
iconic. Consider, however, that such metaphorical icons typically
do not hint at their meaning as clearly as real ones do; that
metaphorically iconic words typically contain at most one icon,
whereas Icono’s words often contain two or more (Section 2.1.1);
and that metaphorically iconic words contain only one type of
icons, whereas Icono’s words can contain both positive black-on-
white icons and negative white-on-black ones (Section 2.1.2).

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Onomatopoeic words like “dripple,” “giggle,” or “clap,” for example,
are metaphorically iconic, and each consists of only one auditory hint to
its meaning—one auditory “icon.” Other spoken words are weakly iconic
at best. For example, across languages, words for large things and teeny
weeny ones appear to disproportionately oen contain, respectively, an /a/
or an /i/ sound. Because languages are not mutually independent,
however, the eect might not begenuine. Likewise, in Sign Language,
words are not seldom metaphorically iconic too. e sign for “eat,” for
example, is commonly depicted by ngers moving toward the mouth,
which is quite intuitive. Signed words, however, typically consist of just
one sign and thus at most one metaphorical icon. Signs can becombined,
but in this process, signers typically cut corners, compress and merge the
signs, and make them less rather than more transparent (Sandler
etal., 2006).
In natural languages, the only written words that are
somewhat iconic are Chinese. Each Chinese character typically
features several pictograms or ideograms. As they became easier
to write, however, these radicals became much less iconic
(Figure1; Xiao and Treiman, 2012). Many of them, moreover, are
not reliable hints to a character’s meaning, but unreliable hints to
its pronunciation (Sections 1.1 and 1.3). Worse, as they come
from a fixed set of 214, these radicals are often not the most
suitable ones with which to express a word and their combinations
can beopaque and overly complex (Sections 2.1.2 and 2.1.3).
Indeed, Chinese characters are notoriously difficult to learn, and
it is hardly a surprise that their remaining iconicity is at best of
little help (Yum etal., 2011; Lo and Yeh, 2018).
Interestingly, the Chinese word for “mammal,” 哺乳動物, is
its own definition and means “breast-feeding animal” (Section
2.1.2). Yet it consists of almost a dozen pictograms and ideograms,
their depictions are hard to recognize, and only some of them are
direct hints to the word’s meaning (the others are rough hints to
its pronunciation). To express the same concept, Icono typically
uses just two highly recognizable icons: one of a cow and one of
a mouse—their meaning given by what they have in common
(Figure 2). Icono offers key mnemonics to the meaning of
“mammal,” not a full-fledged definition of it (Section 2.1.2).
Tellingly, indeed, people who understand something are not said
to get the definition: they are said to get the picture and to see
what one is saying.
5.4. Final thoughts
Those who call a train “一列火車,” “ein Zug,” or “  ”
may not understand each other, and to many people, Esperanto’s
“unu trajno” and the English “a train” are just as unintelligible.
Yet all of us, illiterates included, instantly understand what a little
picture of a train represents. Likewise, for many, deciphering 四,
, or Դ is a challenge, but that four dots could mean “4” is not
hard to wrap one’s brain around. And although the icon of a
magnifying glass on a person’s skull may not remind everyone of
“psychology” (people getting their heads examined), learning this
association is far from a challenge. Only in those exceptional
cases in which it completely fails to visualize the meaning of a
word does Icono become as unhelpful to readers and language
learners as English and Esperanto are to Arabs and Chinese.
At no cost to the writer (thanks to modern technology), Icono
puts readers first. Even fluent readers understand, recognize, and
recall better and faster what simple pictures depict naturally than
what corresponding strings of letters mean conventionally.
Icono’s building blocks are therefore not arbitrary squiggles that
can only beread by those in the know but carefully chosen icons
that are easy for the brain to process; that illustrate, and help
readers recall, what they stand for; and that are accessible to
readers across the world—arguably even to some who struggle
with ordinary texts. These icons, moreover, can express not only
concrete concepts but highly abstract ones as well. Icono’s
sentence structure, meanwhile, is revealed when most helpful:
before, rather than after, one begins reading. Because learning its
pronunciation or phonetic spelling is optional rather than a
prerequisite, and because it shows what it says, Icono is bound to
beeasier to learn to read—and then easier to read—than any
other language, including our own.
Author contributions
e author conrms being the sole contributor of this work and
has approved it for publication.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Paola Bressan for being my blind-spot mirror
with her insightful critiques of numerous issues in various dras—
issues that otherwise would have escaped my attention. Many thanks
also to Nino Trainito and Luigi Garlaschelli for their helpful comments
on a near-nal dra and to Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen for making me
aware of the Naxi’s pictorial Dongba script.
Conflict of interest
e author declares that the research was conducted in the
absence of any commercial or nancial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conict of interest.
Publisher’s note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the
authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated
organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the
reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or
claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or
endorsed by the publisher.
Supplementary material
e Supplementary material for this article can be found online
at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1149381/
full#supplementary-material

Kramer 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1149381
Frontiers in Psychology 20 frontiersin.org
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