Cover not available
Article published In:
Scientific Study of Literature
Vol. 9:1 (2019) ► pp.53–71

Some experimental evidence for sound–emotion interaction

| Bar-Ilan University
| Tel Aviv University
This paper describes a structural account of phonetic symbolism and submits it to empirical investigation. To enable testing for possible iconic sound–emotion relations, participants compared pairs of syllables (e.g., ma – ba) as well as pairs of emotional states (e.g., joyful – sad) on various perceptual scales (e.g., softness). In addition, we replicated the classic ‘bouba/kiki’ experiment to investigate sound-shape symbolism. In accordance with the theoretical model, the results of the experimental tasks suggest that participants can detect abstract similarities between speech sounds and emotions as well as geometrical shapes. We discuss the theoretical model and the experimental results in relation to previous empirical findings and conflicting evidence from the study of affective iconicity in poetry.
Keywords: sound symbolism, affective iconicity, phonological iconicity, cognitive poetics, sound-to-meaning, phonoaesthetics
Article outline
  • A structural theory of phonetic symbolism
  • Rationale and hypotheses
  • Methods
    • Participants
    • Stimuli and procedure
    • Data analysis
  • Results
  • Discussion
  • Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 February 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ssol.19002.gaf
References (25)
References
Aryani, A., Conrad, M., Schmidtke, D., & Jacobs, A. (2018). Why “piss” is ruder than “pee”? The role of sound in affective meaning making. Plos One, 13(6). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aryani, A., Hsu, C. T., & Jacobs, A. M. (2018). The sound of words evokes affective brain responses. Brain Sciences, 8(6). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aryani, A., & Jacobs, A. (2018). Affective congruence between sound and meaning of words facilitates semantic decision. Behavioral Sciences, 8(6), 56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aryani, A., Kraxenberger, M., Ullrich, S., Jacobs, A. M., & Conrad, M. (2016). Measuring the basic affective tone of poems via phonological saliency and iconicity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 10(2), 191–204. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Auracher, J., Albers, S., Zhai, Y., Gareeva, G., & Stavniychuk, T. (2011). P is for happiness, N is for sadness: Universals in sound iconicity to detect emotions in poetry. Discourse Processes, 48(1), 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bachorowski, J.-A. (1999). Vocal expression and perception of emotion. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8(2), 53–57. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bänziger, T., & Scherer, K. R. (2005). The role of intonation in emotional expressions. Speech Communication, 461, 252–267. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Benjamini, Y., & Hochberg, Y. (1995). Controlling the false discovery rate: A practical and powerful approach to multiple testing. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological), 57(1), 289–300. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cohen, J. (1992). A power primer. Psychological Bulletin, 112(1), 155–159. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Saussure, F. (1916). Course in general linguistics. London, United Kingdom: Duckworth.Google Scholar
Fónagy, I. (1961). Communication in poetry. Word – Journal of the International Linguistic Association, 17(2), 194–218.Google Scholar
IBM Corp. (2012). IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 21.0. Armonk, NY: IBM Corp.Google Scholar
Johnson-Laird, P. N., & Oatley, K. (1989). The language of emotions: An analysis of a semantic field. Cognition & Emotion, 3(2), 81–123. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Knoeferle, K., Li, J., Maggioni, E., & Spence, C. (2017). What drives sound symbolism? Different acoustic cues underlie sound-size and sound-shape mappings. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 1–11. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Köhler, W. (1947). Gestalt psychology (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Liveright.Google Scholar
Kraxenberger, M., & Menninghaus, W. (2016). Mimological reveries? Disconfirming the hypothesis of phono-emotional iconicity in poetry. Frontiers in Psychology, 71, 1–9. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pallant, J. (2007). One-way analysis of variance. SPSS Survival Manual: A step by step guide to data analysis using SPSS for Windows (3rd ed.). Maidenhead, United Kingdom: Open University Press.Google Scholar
Ramachandran, S., & Hubbard, E. M. (2001). Synaesthesia – A window into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8(12), 3–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Russell, J. A. (1980). A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(6), 1161–1178. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sauter, D. A., Eisner, F., Calder, A. J., & Scott, S. K. (2010). Perceptual cues in nonverbal vocal expressions of emotion. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63(11), 2251–2272. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tsur, R. (2012). Playing by ear and the tip of the tongue: Precategorial information in poetry. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ullrich, S., Aryani, A., Kraxenberger, M., Jacobs, A. M., & Conrad, M. (2017). On the relation between the general affective meaning and the basic sublexical, lexical, and inter-lexical features of poetic texts-a case study using 57 Poems of H. M. Enzensberger. Frontiers in Psychology, 71, 1–19. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ullrich, S., Kotz, S. A., Schmidtke, D. S., Aryani, A., & Conrad, M. (2016). Phonological iconicity electrifies: An ERP study on affective sound-to-meaning correspondences in German. Frontiers in Psychology, 71(AUG). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Whissell, C. (1999). Phonosymbolism and the emotional nature of sounds: Evidence of the preferential use of particular phonemes in texts of differing emotional tone. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 89(5), 19. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wiseman, M., & van Peer, W. (2002). The sound of meaning: An empirical study. In S. Csábi & J. Zerkowitz (Eds.), Textual secrets: The message of the medium (pp. 379–383). Budapest, Hungary: Akadémiai Nyomda Martonvásár.Google Scholar
Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Calvillo-Torres, Rocío, Juan Haro, Pilar Ferré, Claudia Poch & José A. Hinojosa
2024. Sound symbolic associations in Spanish emotional words: affective dimensions and discrete emotions. Cognition and Emotion ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Schmidtke, David & Markus Conrad
2024. The role of valence and arousal for phonological iconicity in the lexicon of German: a cross-validation study using pseudoword ratings. Cognition and Emotion ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Gafni, Chen & Reuven Tsur
2021. Studying Emotive Effects in Poetry by Quantifying Open-Ended Impressions. Empirical Studies of the Arts 39:2 ► pp. 216 ff. DOI logo
Tsur, Reuven & Chen Gafni
2019. Methodological issues in the study of phonetic symbolism. Scientific Study of Literature 9:2 ► pp. 195 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2022. Sound–Emotion Interaction in Poetry [Linguistic Approaches to Literature, 39], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.