The current research adopts an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the nature of iconicity in language processing. We integrate the notion of iconicity into the framework of psycholinguistics, by combining empirical and theory-based research from cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. The present study contributes to this area of research by investigating the visual recognition of Russian imitative (iconic) words by Russian native speakers. We build on the previous research by taking into consideration different stages of de-iconization (SD) (Flaksman, 2017). The Lexical decision task was performed using iconic words at four SDs as target stimuli, and noniconic and non-words as control stimuli. The results have shown that SDs influence the speed and accuracy of visual recognition of iconic words. The least de-iconized words (SD-1) are recognized significantly slower than the words, which undergo a loss of association between form and meaning (SD-2, SD-3), and the words, which have lost this link (SD-4). We present an account of our findings within the framework of cognitive research.