Iconicity in the mind

Abstract Iconicity, the resemblance between linguistic form and meaning, challenges the traditional view of arbitrariness in language by emphasizing connections rooted in sensory, motor, and affective experiences. This chapter examines the cognitive and neural mechanisms underpinning iconicity, focusing on its role in language comprehension and processing. Drawing on behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging evidence, it explores how cross-modal correspondences form the basis for sound-symbolic mappings and how iconicity facilitates semantic access by engaging additional neural networks for multimodal processing. Special attention is given to the often overlooked role of emotion, highlighting how the brain links affective information in word sounds to both sensory-perceptual and lexico-semantic levels. Building on these insights, a revised neurocognitive model of word recognition is proposed, integrating iconicity as a fundamental component of language processing, unlike traditional models.