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Description: Prior investigations have demonstrated that people tend to link pseudowords such as bouba to rounded shapes and kiki to spiky shapes, but the cognitive processes underlying this matching bias have remained controversial. Here, we present three experiments underscoring the fundamental role of emotional mediation in this sound-shape mapping. Focusing on key previous research, we show that kiki-like pseudowords and spiky shapes, compared to bouba-like pseudowords and rounded shapes, always elicit higher levels of affective arousal, which we assessed through both subjective ratings (Experiment 1) and acoustic models implemented based on pseudoword material (Experiment 2). Crucially, the mediating effect of arousal generalizes to novel pseudowords representative of the language as a whole (Experiment 3). These findings highlight the role that human emotion may play in language development and evolution by grounding associations between abstract concepts (e.g., shapes) and linguistic signs (e.g., words) in the affective system.