Why 'piss' is ruder than 'pee'? The role of sound in affective meaning making

Abstract

Most language users agree that some words sound harsh (e.g. grotesque) whereas others sound soft and pleasing (e.g. lagoon). 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. In a large-scale lexicon analysis, we focused on the affective substrates of words’ meaning (i.e. affective meaning) and words’ sound (i.e. affective sound); both being measured on a two-dimensional space of valence (ranging from pleasant to unpleasant) and arousal (ranging from calm to excited). 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. 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). 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). 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. 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. 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. Rather, even in silent reading, words’ acoustic profiles provide affective perceptual cues that language users may implicitly use to construct words’ overall meaning.

Sound Predicts Meaning: Cross‐Modal Associations Between Formant Frequency and Emotional Tone in Stanzas

“…However, as the frequency of the first formant alone is not sufficient to draw conclusions on the formant dispersion, that is, the distance between the first two formants, it is not clear how these results relate to our study. A similar problem arises when comparing our study with the one by Aryani, Conrad, et al (2018) who tested the relation between Arousal and formant bandwidths as well as between Arousal and standard deviations of spectral center of gravity. These measurements not only contrast with our definition of formant dispersion (distance between mean F2 and F1), thereby precluding a direct comparison, but also introduce acoustic parameters that are prone to be dependent on acoustic context and speaker properties-variables that have been excluded in our study.…”

“…Whereas these three studies employed questionnaires to directly test sound-iconic associations with vowels' articulatory-acoustic features, recent studies applied more indirect approaches. For example, some studies considered the relative occurrence of phonemes or phonetic-acoustic features in annotated wordlists (i.e., wordlists with ratings for Valence and Arousal per word) as an indicator for the emotional connotations of these phonemes (e.g., Adelman, Estes, & Cossu, 2018;Aryani, Conrad, et al, 2018;Louwerse & Qu, 2017). Similar strategies to tackle associations between phonemes (or phonetic features) and emotional tone have previously been applied by Ertel (1965) and Heise (1966).…”

“…Aryani and colleagues, applying neuroimaging techniques (fMRI), reported that words that sounded arousing led to increased activity in areas of the brain that also respond to nonverbal emotional expressions and emotional prosody (Aryani, Hsu, & Jacobs, 2018). Additionally, Aryani, Conrad, et al (2018) reported that acoustic characteristics of words can account for a significant portion of their affective meaning and that these acoustic characteristics could also predict the assessment of the emotional valence and level of arousal of pseudowords. Comparing the effects of articulatory and acoustic features of phonemes on sound-iconic associations, Ohtake and Haryu (2013) observed that the effect of acoustic characteristics was independent from that of articulatory movements, whereas articulatory characteristics alone had no effect on sound-iconic associations.…”

Is less readable liked better? The case of font readability in poetry appreciation

“…font) or phonological form on the perceived emotional content of the poems. Several lines of work indicate that the perceived emotional content of a poem is at least partially explained by the phonological and / or prosodic content of poems [31,[40][41][42][43][44][45].…”

Acoustic and Visual Stimulus Parameters Underlying Sound Symbolic Crossmodal Correspondences

“…Future work could extend the current study by exploring additional CCs, such as mappings between sound and size (Jonas, Spiller, & Hibbard, 2017), taste or emotion (Aryani et al, 2018). It would also be of interest to investigate whether children of different ages or elderly adults are sensitive to similar acoustic and visual properties or if sound-symbolic CCs correspondences change across the lifespan.…”