How language conveys emotion through sound: A review of affective iconicity

Abstract

Traditionally, the lack of association between the form of a word and its meaning (i.e. arbitrariness) has been considered a fundamental aspect of language. However, this idea has recently been challenged by growing evidence of form-meaning relationships in words from different conceptual domains, such as size, shape, motion, and colour. More recently, several studies have provided evidence of non-arbitrary associations between the acoustic or phonological forms of words and their meanings when conveying emotional concepts. This phenomenon is referred to as affective iconicity. These effects are evident within and across languages through the over-representation of certain phonemes in words denoting positive or negative emotions (e.g., the phoneme/i/tends to occur in positive words in several different languages) or through statistical regularities in the phonetic features of emotional words (e.g., in English, German and Spanish, sibilant sounds tend to be associated with a high degree of emotional activation of a word’s referent). In this article, we review the literature on affective iconicity. Overall, the current findings suggest that non-arbitrary relationships between word forms and affective meanings may have evolved from the capacity to integrate multimodal inputs with affective experiences. This ability could have been advantageous for communicating information relevant to an individual's survival through language. We argue that affective iconicity effects arise from a link between phonetic and phonological forms and schematic representations of affective experiences and states during the lexicalisation of emotional concepts.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Language Sciences, 2026 · DOI ↗