Neuroscience
The relationship between the meaning of a word and the letter strings of which it is comprised is usually thought to be arbitrary. That is, the meaning of a word is dictated by convention and the emotional tone of the speaker. Strip these away and the sounds of the letter groupings themselves - known as phonemes - are generally considered meaningless. At least that's been a popular view for some time.
But now a study has been published that challenges this account. Blake Myers-Schulz and his colleagues show that the shift in sound from some phonemes to others carries emotional meaning of its own, quite independent from word meanings or tone of voice.
Human speech creates sound at different frequencies. Myers-Schulz and his team focused on the changes in certain frequency peaks in speech - known as formants - as nonsense words were spoken. Specifically, they divided nonsense words into those in which the first two formants went from low to high (e.g. bupaba, pafabi, mipaba) and those in which this sound shift was reversed, going high to low (e.g. dugada, tatoku, gadigu). They were matched on many other sound features, such as plosives, nasality, intonation and volume.
Thirty-two adult participants were shown pairs of these nonsense words on a computer screen, one of which always went low to high, the other high to low (in terms of formant shifts). Together with the words, two pictures were shown, one positive, one negative (e.g. a cute puppy and a snarling dog). The participants' job was to allocate the two nonsense words to the two pictures in the way that seemed most appropriate. The key finding was that 80 per cent of the time, they matched the word that had the low-high sound shift with the positive picture and the high-to-low word with the negative picture.
It was a similar story when 20 more adult participants performed the same task but with the words spoken by a computer programme rather than shown visually. In this case, they matched the low-to-high nonsense words with the positive pictures on 65 per cent of occasions - still far more often than you'd expect based on chance alone.
The findings suggest that strings of phonemes (the sounds that comprise words) have an emotional quality of their own, quite separate from any word meaning or the tone or volume of an utterance. This emotional meaning is conveyed purely by the acoustic properties of the word as the sound frequencies change from one phoneme to the next.
There could be intriguing real-life applications for this research in terms of marketing and PR because the implication is that some words convey positive emotion simply by virtue of their acoustic properties, above and beyond any literal word meaning. "Even in artistic contexts, such as film and literature, these acoustic principles could be applied to evoke a particular emotional subtext," the researchers said. "Indeed our data suggest that 'Darth Vader' is an acoustically more appropriate name for an intergalactic miscreant than 'Barth Vaber'."
_________________________________
Myers-Schulz B, Pujara M, Wolf RC and Koenigs M (2013). Inherent emotional quality of human speech sounds. Cognition and emotion, 27 (6), 1105-13 PMID: 23286242
--Further reading--
Does Darth Vader meet the diagnostic criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder?
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
Why it's apt - psycho-acoustically speaking - that Darth Vader wasn't called Barth Vaber
But now a study has been published that challenges this account. Blake Myers-Schulz and his colleagues show that the shift in sound from some phonemes to others carries emotional meaning of its own, quite independent from word meanings or tone of voice.
Human speech creates sound at different frequencies. Myers-Schulz and his team focused on the changes in certain frequency peaks in speech - known as formants - as nonsense words were spoken. Specifically, they divided nonsense words into those in which the first two formants went from low to high (e.g. bupaba, pafabi, mipaba) and those in which this sound shift was reversed, going high to low (e.g. dugada, tatoku, gadigu). They were matched on many other sound features, such as plosives, nasality, intonation and volume.
Thirty-two adult participants were shown pairs of these nonsense words on a computer screen, one of which always went low to high, the other high to low (in terms of formant shifts). Together with the words, two pictures were shown, one positive, one negative (e.g. a cute puppy and a snarling dog). The participants' job was to allocate the two nonsense words to the two pictures in the way that seemed most appropriate. The key finding was that 80 per cent of the time, they matched the word that had the low-high sound shift with the positive picture and the high-to-low word with the negative picture.
It was a similar story when 20 more adult participants performed the same task but with the words spoken by a computer programme rather than shown visually. In this case, they matched the low-to-high nonsense words with the positive pictures on 65 per cent of occasions - still far more often than you'd expect based on chance alone.
The findings suggest that strings of phonemes (the sounds that comprise words) have an emotional quality of their own, quite separate from any word meaning or the tone or volume of an utterance. This emotional meaning is conveyed purely by the acoustic properties of the word as the sound frequencies change from one phoneme to the next.
There could be intriguing real-life applications for this research in terms of marketing and PR because the implication is that some words convey positive emotion simply by virtue of their acoustic properties, above and beyond any literal word meaning. "Even in artistic contexts, such as film and literature, these acoustic principles could be applied to evoke a particular emotional subtext," the researchers said. "Indeed our data suggest that 'Darth Vader' is an acoustically more appropriate name for an intergalactic miscreant than 'Barth Vaber'."
_________________________________
Myers-Schulz B, Pujara M, Wolf RC and Koenigs M (2013). Inherent emotional quality of human speech sounds. Cognition and emotion, 27 (6), 1105-13 PMID: 23286242
--Further reading--
Does Darth Vader meet the diagnostic criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder?
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Why Do People Find Some Nonsense Words Like "finglam" Funnier Than Others Like "sersice"
Calm down, it's not that funny! When you're trying to understand a complex phenomenon, a sensible approach is to pare things back as far as possible. For a new study, published recently in the Journal of Memory and Language, psychologists...
- Foreign Languages Easier To Learn When They're Sung Rather Than Spoken
You know what a native speaker sounds like when you're trying to get to grips with a foreign language. The verbal cacophony seems to roll off their tongue so fast that you can't event tell one word from the next. Now Daniele Schon and colleagues...
- When Castanets Taste Of Tuna
Words have sensory connotations to most of us. The word leathery really does feel ...well, rather leathery. But to some synaesthetes – people who experience a cross-over of the senses – such analogies are literal and can relate to tastes. That is,...
- Tip Of The Fingers Syndrome
We’ve all had that ‘tip of the tongue’ feeling when we’re sure we know the word or name for something but we just can’t think of it. Now a study has shown that a similar phenomenon occurs in American Sign Language (ASL), in what the researchers...
- Language Isn't Magical (but It Is Special)
One of the most common comments about ecological psychology is that it's hard to imagine how it could apply to things like language. The sense is that language is a completely different kind of beast than perception-action and that it requires a completely...