Talking emotions: vowel selection in fictional names depends on the emotional valence of the to-be-named faces and objects

ABSTRACT

One prestudy based on a corpus analysis and four experiments in which participants had to invent novel names for persons or objects (N = 336 participants in total) investigated how the valence of a face or an object affects the phonological characteristics of the respective novel name. Based on the articulatory feedback hypothesis, we predicted that /i:/ is included more frequently in fictional names for faces or objects with a positive valence than for those with a negative valence. For /o:/, the pattern should reverse. An analysis of the Berlin Affective Word List – Reloaded (BAWL-R) yielded a higher number of occurrences of /o:/ in German words with negative valence than in words with positive valence; with /i:/ the situation is less clear. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants named persons showing a positive or a negative facial expression. Names for smiling persons included more /i:/s and fewer /o:/s than names for persons with a negative facial expression. In Experiments 3 and 4, participants heard a Swahili narration and invented pseudo-Swahili names for objects with positive, neutral, or negative valence. Names for positive objects included more /i:/s than names for neutral or negative objects, and names for negative objects included more /o:/s than names for neutral or positive objects. These finding indicate a stable vowel-emotion link.

KEYWORDS:

• Sound symbolism
• emotional valence
• facial expression
• pseudowords

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Hanna Reinhardt, Katja Bollmann, Anne Elsner, and Kathleen Gerst for running the experiments and preparing the experimental materials and Susann Ullrich for preparing and pretesting the materials for Experiment 4 and for her comments on this manuscript. In addition, we thank Lea Boecker and an anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Theories including an articulation-emotion link are not restricted to articulatory muscle movements in vowel production. Topolinski et al. (2014) investigated how different articulation places of consonants affect word preferences. The authors suggest that pseudowords with inward related consonantal order patterns (e.g. MENIKA) are preferred to pseudowords with outward related consonantal order patterns (e.g. KENIMA). The suggested reason for that is that inward patterns are associated to positive mouth actions as swallowing and outward patterns are associated to negative mouth actions like spitting.

2 In addition, the BAWL-R includes information concerning a number of linguistic dimensions such as number of syllables, number of phonemes, frequency and others.

3 Articulation of the names was instructed to make sure that raters were able to distinguish tense and lax vowels from each other. Solely the articulation of tense vowels requires the contraction of the ZMM or the OOM.

4 We thank Lea Boecker for pointing this out.