Member-only story
A study published in the journal, Psychological Science, claims that some sound combinations of words elicit different emotional responses in our brains. Even before the current pandemic hit the headlines, the sound of the word ‘virus’ triggered a measurable reaction.
It seems that the researchers of the study, “Affective Arousal Links Sounds to Meaning”, also investigated the correlation between shapes and sounds. When volunteers were presented with a spiky shape and a rounded shape and then asked to predict which of the two was named Kiki and which was called bouba, the vast majority matched them according to the sound each word makes when read aloud.
This well-known matching test returns similar results across most age groups and cultures around the world, although no one can agree as to why it should be. The team, led by Jr Professor Morten Christiansen, wrote “For most words, the relationship between sound and meaning appears arbitrary: The sound of a word does not typically tell us what it means. A growing body of work, however, has shown that the sound of words can carry subtle cues about what they refer to.”
In their attempt to refine the study further, they asked the volunteers to rate the level of arousal for both auditory and visual stimuli, taken from eight former studies using the matching effect. Their…