I ran a few searches for this myself, looking for articles or anything. My guess is that it's pure association, attributed to the psychological term "conditioning". In 1920, as part of an experiment to show fear, the psychologist John B. Watson got a child called Albert. He would ring a loud bell to scare him and place a rat on his lap.

Unsurprisingly, Albert became very distressed whenever introduced to a rat again, even without the loud bell. He'd learned to associate the loud ringing with the rat and realised whenever a rat was there, bad things would happen.

I think it's the same principle here, it's just not fear that we're conditioned to. When we urinate we hear ourselves pee. Obviously we cannot help but associate a trickling faucet with it since we pee every single day.
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment

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