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- All Subjects: emotion
- Creators: Benitez, Viridiana
The Wham-Womb Sound Symbolic Effect: English-Speaking Children and Adults Link Phonemes with Arousal
Description
Sound symbolism—the association between word sounds and meaning—has been shown to be an effective communication tool that promotes language comprehension and word learning. Much of the literature is constrained to investigating sound as it relates to physical characteristics (e.g. size or shape), and research has predominantly studied the phenomenon in adults. The current study examined the sound symbolic wham-womb effect, which postulates that words with the /æ/ phoneme are associated with increased arousal while words with the /u/ phoneme are associated with little to no arousal. The effect was tested in both adults and children aged 5-7 years old using a word-to-scene matching task. Participants were presented with two pseudowords (differing only by their vowel phoneme: /æ/ or /u/; e.g. smad and smood) and two scenes depicting an animal in either a more arousing or less arousing situation. Participants were then asked to match which of the scenes fit one of the pseudowords. Results showed that the trial-by-trial performance for adults and children were significantly greater than chance, indicating that the wham-womb effect is exhibited in both adults and children. There was also a significant difference in performance between adults and children, with adults showing a more robust effect. This study provides the first empirical evidence that both children and adults link phonemes to arousal and that this effect may change across development.
ContributorsKuo, Jillian Elaine (Author) / Benitez, Viridiana (Thesis advisor) / McBeath, Michael (Committee member) / Scherer, Nancy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
I recently established the gleam-glum effect confirming in both English and Mandarin that words with the /i/ vowel-sound (like “gleam”) are rated more emotionally positive than matched words with the /ʌ/ vowel-sound (like “glum”). Here I confirm that these vowel sounds also influence the semantic perception of monosyllabic pseudo-words. In Experiment 1, 100 participants rated 50 individual /i/ monosyllabic pseudo-words (like “zeech”) as significantly more positive than 50 matched /ʌ/ pseudo-words (like “zuch”), replicating my previous findings with real words. Experiment 2 assessed the gleam-glum effect on pseudo-words using a forced-choice task. Participants (n = 148) were presented with the 50 pairs of pseudo-words used in Experiment 1 and tasked to guess the most likely meaning of each pseudo-word by matching them with one of two meaning words that were either extremely positive or extremely negative in affective valence (Warriner et al., 2013). I found a remarkably robust effect in which every one of the 50 pseudo-word pairs was on average more likely to have the /i/ word matched with the positive meaning word and /ʌ/ word with the negative one (exact binomial test, p < .001, z = 7.94). The findings confirm that the gleam-glum effect facilitates bootstrapping meaning of words from their pronunciations. These findings coupled with previous real word findings (Yu et al., in press), showing not only that the effect encompasses the entire English lexicon but can also be explained with an embodied facial musculature mechanism, is consistent with the idea that sound symbolism may shape vocabulary use of a language over time by influencing semantic perception.
ContributorsYu, Shin-Phing (Author) / McBeath, Michael K. (Thesis advisor) / Glenberg, Arthur M. (Thesis advisor, Committee member) / Stone, Gregory (Committee member) / Benitez, Viridiana (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021