Department of Experimental and Neurocognitive Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Department of Cognitive, Social and Organizational Psychology, University of La Laguna, La Laguna, Spain.
PLoS One. 2018 Jun 6;13(6):e0198430. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0198430. eCollection 2018.
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.
大多数语言使用者都认为有些词听起来刺耳（如“怪诞”），而有些词听起来柔和悦耳（如“泻湖”）。虽然人类语言的这一显著特征在艺术和诗歌中一直被创造性地运用，但人们仍然不知道一个词的发音本身是否会对听众感知和解释该词的词义做出任何贡献。在一项大规模的词汇分析中，我们专注于词的意义的情感基础（即情感意义）和词的声音（即情感声音）；这两者都在效价（从愉快到不愉快）和唤醒度（从平静到兴奋）的二维空间上进行测量。我们测试了这样一个假设，即词的声音具有情感象似特征，当听众评估该词的情感意义时，这些特征可以隐含地影响他们。结果表明，印刷词的情感意义评价的差异很大一部分取决于从这些词转换为口语形式后从中提取的一些光谱和时间声学特征（研究 1）。为了测试这种影响的情感性质，我们使用两种不同的方法独立评估这些词的情感声音：通过直接评价（研究 2a），以及通过我们基于伪词材料实现的声学模型（研究 2b）。与我们的假设一致，词的声音对词的情感意义评价的估计贡献确实与这些词的情感声音有关；唤醒度的影响比效价更强。进一步的分析揭示了导致声音对意义影响的关键语音特征：例如，元音短、辅音无声、嘶嘶作响的咝音（如“piss”）的词感觉更令人兴奋和负面。我们的发现表明，词义的形成过程不仅取决于词的形式方面与它们所指概念之间的任意映射。相反，即使在默读中，词的声学特征也提供了情感感知线索，语言使用者可能会隐含地使用这些线索来构建词的整体意义。
