Recent evidence demonstrates that pictures corresponding to iconic signs are named faster
than pictures corresponding to non-iconic signs. The present study investigates the locus of
the iconicity advantage in hearing bimodal bilinguals. A naming experiment with iconic and noniconic
pictures in Italian Sign Language (LIS) was conducted. Bimodal bilinguals named the pictures
either using a noun construction that involved the production of the sign corresponding to the
picture or using a marked demonstrative pronoun construction replacing the picture sign. In this
last condition, the pictures were colored and participants were instructed to name the pronoun
together with the color. The iconicity advantage was reliable in the noun utterance but not in
the marked demonstrative pronoun utterance. In a third condition, the colored pictures were
presented as distractor stimuli and participants required to name the color. In this last condition,
distractor pictures with iconic signs elicited faster naming latencies than non-iconic signs. The
results suggest that the advantage of iconic signs in production arises at the level of semantic-tophonological
links. In addition, we conclude that bimodal bilinguals and native signers do not differ
in terms of the activation flow within the sign production system
