With the present study, we aimed at addressing this research question. Nonetheless, despite the increasing number of studies examining sound-to-meaning associations, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no empirical study examining whether specific properties in the sound of a real word play a part in contributing to its overall meaning. These results assign a supplementary function to sound-to-meaning correspondences that structure vocabulary and play an important role for both phylogenetic language evolution and ontogenetic language development. More recently, a growing body of research challenges the idea of absolute arbitrariness by providing evidence for non-arbitrary sound-to-meaning correspondences (see for reviews) including some universal patterns across various languages of the world. However, despite the fact that influential linguists and experimental psychologists throughout the last century promoted the idea that the sound of a word may have a synchronic, productive effect on overall meaning construction, the notion of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign has generally dominated research on human language. Looking at the famous seven words listed by American comedian George Carlin that “you can never say on television” reveals that all of these words contain voiceless stops (/t/ and /k/) or hissing sibilants (/s/ and /ʃ/), which are fortis consonants, articulated with greater oral pressure and relatively higher muscular force compared to their lenis counterparts. In a similar fashion, swear words usually possess specific phonological patterns that can potentially amplify the negative emotional response that they mean to evoke. Within literary studies, many have noted that poetry achieves much of its affective aesthetic impact through sound manipulation, and that phonological structure has a semantic function beyond the decorative. hissing sibilants /s/ and /z/) evoke a feeling of “terror” provoked by “brazen” bells. Nevertheless, even a naïve reader-without prior knowledge of such literary devices as cacophony or euphony-would experience how, for instance, in Poe’s verse “… Hear the loud alarum bells-Brazen bells! -What tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!”, the explosive consonant /t/ and other harsh and discordant sounds (e.g. the speech sounds that constitute words) have no inherent semantic content nor have they any stand-alone contribution to words’ meaning. Human language has generally been considered to be entirely symbolic in that words convey meaning through conventional and arbitrary links to concepts they refer to. Rather, even in silent reading, words’ acoustic profiles provide affective perceptual cues that language users may implicitly use to construct words’ overall meaning. Our findings suggest that the process of meaning making is not solely determined by arbitrary mappings between formal aspects of words and concepts they refer to. Further analyses revealed crucial phonetic features potentially causing the effect of sound on meaning: For instance, words with short vowels, voiceless consonants, and hissing sibilants (as in ‘piss’) feel more arousing and negative. In line with our hypothesis, the estimated contribution of words’ sound to ratings of words’ affective meaning was indeed associated with the affective sound of these words with a stronger effect for arousal than for valence. In order to test the affective nature of this effect, we independently assessed the affective sound of these words using two different methods: through direct rating (study2a), and through acoustic models that we implemented based on pseudoword materials (study2b).
The results show that a significant portion of the variance in affective meaning ratings of printed words depends on a number of spectral and temporal acoustic features extracted from these words after converting them to their spoken form (study1). We tested the hypothesis that the sound of a word possesses affective iconic characteristics that can implicitly influence listeners when evaluating the affective meaning of that word.
affective sound) both being measured on a two-dimensional space of valence (ranging from pleasant to unpleasant) and arousal (ranging from calm to excited). affective meaning) and words’ sound (i.e. In a large-scale lexicon analysis, we focused on the affective substrates of words’ meaning (i.e. While this prominent feature of human language has always been creatively deployed in art and poetry, it is still largely unknown whether the sound of a word in itself makes any contribution to the word’s meaning as perceived and interpreted by the listener. grotesque) whereas others sound soft and pleasing (e.g. Most language users agree that some words sound harsh (e.g.
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