Sharp as a tack, round as a ball: iconic mappings facilitate word retrieval in spoken language production

Whilst accounts of language production implicitly assume that the mapping between word meanings and forms must be arbitrary, iconic links between concepts and phonology are attested in the lexicon and have been shown to influence language processing. Here, we tested whether spoken production is facilitated when there is iconic congruence between conceptual and phonological features of words due to sound symbolism (i.e. the bouba-kiki effect). Native French speakers named images through words which were either iconic (ballon – “balloon”) or non-iconic (dauphin – “dolphin”). Results showed that participants produced iconic words faster than non-iconic ones, but only when those words were acquired later in life. These findings support the hypothesis that iconic mappings can facilitate word retrieval. They further suggest that conceptual and phonological information strongly interact throughout the production process, and that iconicity, like age of acquisition, should be considered among the factors underlying our capacity to retrieve words.