Valence Sound Symbolism: Processing efficiency and cognitive mechanisms

• Applicants: Dr. Anita Körner; Professor Dr. Ralf Rummer
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 528468358

The overarching objective of the present project is to gain a deeper understanding of valence sound symbolism. Valence sound symbolism is the phenomenon that lip spreading (vs. lip rounding) vowels are associated with positive (vs. negative) affective valence. For example, when asked to invent pseudo-names for faces, participants tend to more frequently use /i/ for happy faces and /o/ for angry faces. The present project is intended to answer two questions concerning valence sound symbolism. First, is valence sound symbolism so deeply engrained as to lead to more efficient processing? Second, is valence sound symbolism—in contrast to brightness and size sound symbolism—driven by articulatory compared to acoustic cognitive mechanisms? First, although valence sound symbolism has been demonstrated with explicit tasks, whether it is automatic—in the sense that stimuli that match (vs. mismatch) valence sound symbolism lead to more efficient processing—is as yet unclear. We intend to examine automaticity of valence sound symbolism in four experiments, measuring response speed and memory performance for matching (e.g., /i/ and a happy face) compared with mismatching (e.g., /i/ and an angry face) stimuli. If matching stimuli facilitate performance (i.e., faster responses and more accurate memory performance), this will support the hypothesis that valence sound symbolism is deeply engrained in the human mind and may influence online language processing. Second, we intend to compare valence sound symbolism with other sound symbolism phenomena that rest on associations between meaning and vowels, specifically size sound symbolism and brightness sound symbolism. All three phenomena have been found to rely on overlapping vowels. That is, /i/ is associated with brightness, smallness, and positivity. Accordingly, it is possible that all three sound symbolism phenomena share the same underlying psychological mechanisms. However, size and brightness are both associated with pitch and might therefore rest on vowel frequency. For valence sound symbolism, in contrast, we have found initial evidence that facial muscle tension employed in vowel articulation, rather than vowel height, is the driving cognitive mechanism. Accordingly, although all three sound symbolic associations have been found to partly rest on the same vowels, we hypothesize that their underlying cognitive mechanisms differ. To test this, four experiments will compare valence with brightness sound symbolism and four experiments will compare valence with size sound symbolism. This comparison will provide a deeper understanding of the cognitive mechanisms responsible for sound symbolism. More generally, the present examination of embodied processes in sound symbolism can open a new avenue how language—via embodied cognition (viz. articulation muscle activity) during word form processing—can influence the human conceptual system.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants