In my dissertation study, I explored patterns in grammar and iconicity to examine what similarities and differences exist among signed languages from various parts of the world. My dissertation examining kinship terminologies of forty signed languages was based on Greenberg’s classic study on universals of spoken language kinship terminology. My study revealed interesting typological patterns regarding iconicity and grammatical marking. A survey of signed kin terms illustrated three categories of iconic properties that may inform emerging typological patterns of: physiobiological human traits, universal human cognitive experiences, and culture-specific properties. Instead of clustering iconic forms into one undifferentiated category, I classified the corpora to identify which iconic patterns help us to understand more about the characteristics of iconicity across many different signed languages. Furthermore, I found that the mechanisms of human cognition and common human experiences lead to a high incidence of lexical similarity across signed languages. This finding contributes to problematic issues involved with identifying and classifying signed languages by the similarities in their lexicon to determine whether a given language is a member of a signed language family or not. In addition, the study also found evidence of gender and numeral marking in the kinship terminology of some of the sign languages studied. One significant finding showed that nearly all signed languages produced mother and father on the face, indicating a typological pattern.