Article published In:
Scientific Study of LiteratureVol. 9:1 (2019) ► pp.53–71
Some experimental evidence for sound–emotion interaction
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
References
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). 
Aryani, A., Hsu, C. T., & Jacobs, A. M.
(2018) The sound of words evokes affective brain
responses. Brain Sciences, 8(6).
Aryani, A., & Jacobs, A.
(2018) Affective congruence between sound and meaning of words
facilitates semantic decision. Behavioral Sciences, 8(6), 56.
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.
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.
Bachorowski, J.-A.
(1999) Vocal expression and perception of emotion. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8(2), 53–57.
Bänziger, T., & Scherer, K. R.
(2005) The role of intonation in emotional expressions. Speech Communication, 461, 252–267.
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.
Cohen, J.
(1992) A power primer. Psychological Bulletin, 112(1), 155–159.
De Saussure, F.
(1916) Course in general linguistics. London, United Kingdom: Duckworth.
Fónagy, I.
(1961) Communication in poetry. Word – Journal of the International Linguistic Association, 17(2), 194–218.
IBM Corp.
(2012) IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 21.0. Armonk, NY: IBM Corp.
Johnson-Laird, P. N., & Oatley, K.
(1989) The language of emotions: An analysis of a semantic
field. Cognition & Emotion, 3(2), 81–123.
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.
Köhler, W.
(1947) Gestalt psychology (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Liveright.
Kraxenberger, M., & Menninghaus, W.
(2016) Mimological reveries? Disconfirming the hypothesis of
phono-emotional iconicity in poetry. Frontiers in Psychology, 71, 1–9.
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.
Ramachandran, S., & Hubbard, E. M.
(2001) Synaesthesia – A window into perception, thought and
language. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8(12), 3–34.
Russell, J. A.
(1980) A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(6), 1161–1178.
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.
Tsur, R.
(2012) Playing by ear and the tip of the tongue: Precategorial information in
poetry. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
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. 
Tsur, Reuven & Chen Gafni
2019. Methodological issues in the study of phonetic symbolism. Scientific Study of Literature 9:2 ► pp. 195 ff.
[no author supplied]
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 february 2023. 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.