The gleam-glum effect: /i:/ versus /λ/ phonemes generically carry emotional valence.

Abstract

The gleam-glum effect is a novel sound symbolic finding that words with the /i:/-phoneme (like gleam) are perceived more positive emotionally than matched words with the /K/-phoneme (like glum). We provide data that not only confirm the effect but also are consistent with an explanation that /i:/ and /K/ articulation tend to co-occur with activation of positive versus negative emotional facial musculature respectively. Three studies eliminate selection bias by including all applicable English words from the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007) and the Warriner et al. ( 2013) database and every possible Mandarin Pinyin combination that differ only in the middle phoneme (/i:/ vs /K/). In Study 1, 61 U.S. undergraduates rated monosyllabic English /i:/ words as robustly more positive than matched /K/ words. Study 2 analyzed the Warriner et al. ( 2013) valence ratings, extending the gleam-glum effect to all applicable words in the database. In Study 3, 38 U.S. participants (using English) and 37 participants in China (using Mandarin Pinyin) rated word pairs under three conditions that moderate musculature activity: Read aloud (Enhance), read silently (Control), and read silently while chewing gum (Interfere). Indeed, the effect was both replicated and was significantly larger when facial musculature was enhanced than when interfered with, and the two language populations did not significantly differ. These findings confirm a robust gleam-glum effect, despite semantic noise, in English and Mandarin Pinyin. Furthermore, these data are consistent with the hypothesis that this type of sound symbolism arises from the overlap in muscles used both in articulation and emotion expression.

Articulation contributes to valence sound symbolism.

“…A caveat of the present research is that we examined only one language. The same phenomenon, more positive valence for /i/ compared with other vowels, has recently been observed in other languages as well (see Garrido & Godinho, 2021; Yu et al, 2021); we would expect these findings to be caused by the same mechanism. However, because we did not test generalizability of the mechanism across languages, this is mere speculation.…”

“…Similar results were obtained when participants invented names for valenced objects (e.g., a coffin or a dolphin, Rummer & Schweppe, 2019, Experiments 3 and 4). Moreover, the positive valence of /i/ compared with other vowels has been recently replicated for speakers of languages besides German, namely European Portuguese (Garrido & Godinho, 2021), Mandarin Pinyin, and English (Yu et al, 2021).…”

Children infer the behavioral contexts of unfamiliar foreign songs.

“…Humans even extend these emotional inferences to nonanimate environmental sounds (Ma & Thompson, 2015) and abstract shapes (Sievers et al, 2019). And a broader class of innate psychoacoustical relationships are thought to underlie the surprisingly robust cross-linguistic associations between certain speech sounds and meaning in the world’s languages (Blasi et al, 2016; Imai et al, 2008; Nuckolls, 1999; Yu et al, 2021). Form-function inferences in music may rely on similar, largely innate mechanisms.…”

Palatal is for happiness, plosive is for sadness: evidence for stochastic relationships between phoneme classes and sentiment polarity in Hungarian

“…A variety of emotional qualities have been within the focus of attention in recent investigations, demonstrating that sound–meaning correspondences can be established between individual sounds and emotional qualities. For example, /i:/ is more positive and /o:/ is more negative (Rummer & Schweppe, 2019; Yu et al, 2021) and /l/ is associated with pleasantness and /r/ with unpleasantness (Whissell, 1999). Correspondences have also emerged between the relative position of phonemes within a word and emotional quality (Adelman et al, 2018; Louwerse & Qu, 2017), as well as phoneme classes and emotional qualities.…”