Evolutionary roots of sound symbolism. Association tasks of animal properties with phonetic features

•Linguistic signs are not fully arbitrary in today's languages.•Human communication likely developed on the basis of non-arbitrary signs.•French speakers link animal attributes to phonetic features in explicit associations.•French animal names lack the sound symbolic associations evidenced experimentally.•Cognitive and linguistic sound symbolic processes are keys to language evolution.

Contradicting Saussure's arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, sound symbolism - the systematic association of sounds with meanings - is consistently found across languages. It may have offered a ground for our ancestors to develop an initial communication system, and later move toward symbolic signs. We tested sound symbolic associations in French between phonetic segments or phonetic features and various attributes of animals (size, dangerousness…). A first experimental setting revealed no significant association, while a second did. These associations furthermore do not appear in French animal names. We discuss these results in the light of scenarios of language origins and evolution.