This study investigates the temporal dynamics of sign production and how particular aspects of the signed modality influence the early stages of lexical access. To that end, we explored the electrophysiological correlates associated to sign frequency and iconicity in a picture signing task in a group of bimodal bilinguals. Moreover, a subset of the same participants was tested in the same task but naming the pictures instead. Our results revealed that both frequency and iconicity influenced lexical access in sign production. At the ERP level, iconicity effects originated very early in the course of signing (while absent in the spoken modality), suggesting a stronger activation of the semantic properties for iconic signs. Moreover, frequency effects were modulated by iconicity, suggesting that lexical access in signed language is determined by the iconic properties of the signs. These results support the idea that lexical access is sensitive to the same phenomena in word and sign production, but its time-course is modulated by particular aspects of the modality in which a lexical item will be finally articulated.

This research was supported by two grants from the Spanish Government, PSI2011-23033 and CONSOLIDER-INGENIO2010 CSD2007-00048, one grant from the Catalan Government, SGR 2009-1521, and from the European Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013 Cooperation grant agreement no. 613465-AThEME). CB was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship JCI-2010-06504 from the Spanish Government and now is supported by the People Program (Marie Curie Actions, FP7-PEOPLE 2014-2016) under REA agreement no. 623845.