In contrast to the mainstream arbitrariness of sound-meaning relationships in modern linguistics, sound symbolism manifests a direct resemblance between sign and referent. Cross-linguistic observations have indicated that onomatopoeia, the direct representations of natural sounds in an iconic way, are spread worldwide and may provide a scaffolding mechanism for children in the early stages of language acquisition. Focusing on the universality and language-specific idiosyncrasy of sound symbolism in onomatopoeic forms, this study compares and contrasts the phonological features of animal sounds in Korean and English. A comparative analysis based on articulatory criteria is performed to describe the features of consonants and vowels in onomatopoeic words. The results suggest that even though the onomatopoeic animal sounds of Korean and English manifest themselves differently according to their phonotactics and phonological systems, these highly dissimilar languages with distinct phoneme inventories employ conventionalized forms that bear certain phonetic similarities. Both demonstrate similar patterns in the distributions of segments and share analogous representations for animal sounds to some extent. Along with cross-lingual phonological alikeness, sound symbolic correspondences between sound and size are observed in the animal sounds of both languages. Such findings support the universality of iconic links and sound symbolism in language. (Korea University)