By Stephen Beech
Pleasant-sounding words are easier to remember, according to a study.
People perceive words with different sounds as differing in their beauty, say linguists.
The new study suggests that the phonemic composition of words influences as how beautiful we perceive them to be, and how well we remember them.
Study leader Dr. Theresa Matzinger said: “While English words such as harmony, lullaby, or melody sound soft and pleasing to many ears, drudge, blunt, or moist tend to be perceived as harsh or unpleasant.
“For a long time, researchers have speculated about why some words evoke pleasantness while others sound disagreeable.
“Until now, however, it has been unclear whether we truly find the sound itself beautiful or whether our perception of beauty is primarily shaped by a word’s meaning.”
For the study, Dr. Matzinger approached the question with a fresh method.
The researchers tested artificial “pseudowords” with no meaning – for example clisious, smanious and drikious – for their aesthetic sound qualities.
That allowed them, for the first time, to examine how sounds alone, independent of meaning, influence perception.
The team also investigated whether the aesthetic qualities of sounds affected how easily the words could be learned.
A total of 100 English-speaking participants heard and saw various pseudowords that had deliberately, based on earlier anecdotal descriptions, been designed to sound “appealing”, “neutral”, or “unappealing”.
The participants were first asked to learn and memorize the words; later, they were asked to recall them.
Finally, they rated how beautiful they found each word.
Dr. Matzinger from the University of Vienna in Austria, said: “We found that the words that participants remembered best were also the ones they rated as most beautiful – but these were not always the words that we, as researchers, had originally designed to be the most beautiful.”
She says previous studies on word beauty were therefore likely strongly influenced by word meaning, which may have overshadowed the aesthetic qualities of the sounds.
The new findings, published in the journal PLOS One, point to a close relationship between phonetic beauty and memorability.
Dr. Matzinger said: “Whether we remember things better because we find them beautiful, or find them beautiful because we can remember them more easily, remains an open question.”
She says it is also possible that certain sound combinations feel more familiar because they occur frequently in a person’s native language, and that the familiarity makes them both more aesthetically pleasing and easier to remember, similar to the effect of familiar melodies in music.
Dr. Matzinger believes the study offers fresh insights into the aesthetic perception and learnability of language.
She said the links may have implications for learning a foreign language, marketing strategies, and even language change across generations.
Dr. Matzinger added: “Certain sound patterns may persist in languages because they sound pleasant, while others may disappear because we find them less appealing.”
