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Eros, Beauty, and Phon-Aesthetic Judgements of Language Sound. We Like It Flat and Fast, but Not Melodious. Comparing Phonetic and Acoustic Features of 16 European Languages

Kogan, Vita V., Reiterer, Susanne M. (2021) Eros, Beauty, and Phon-Aesthetic Judgements of Language Sound. We Like It Flat and Fast, but Not Melodious. Comparing Phonetic and Acoustic Features of 16 European Languages. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 15 . Article Number 578594. E-ISSN 1662-5161. (doi:10.3389/fnhum.2021.578594) (KAR id:86794)

Abstract

This paper concerns sound aesthetic preferences for European foreign languages. We investigated the phonetic-acoustic dimension of the linguistic aesthetic pleasure to describe the “music” found in European languages. The Romance languages, French, Italian, and Spanish, take a lead when people talk about melodious language – the music-like effects in the language (a.k.a., phonetic chill). On the other end of the melodiousness spectrum are German and Arabic that are often considered sounding harsh and un-attractive. Despite the public interest, limited research has been conducted on the topic of phonaesthetics, i.e., the subfield of phonetics that is concerned with the aesthetic properties of speech sounds (Crystal, 2008). Our goal is to fill the existing research gap by identifying the acoustic features that drive the auditory perception of language sound beauty. What is so music-like in the language that makes people say “it is music in my ears”? We had 45 central European participants listening to 16 auditorily presented European languages and rating each language in terms of 22 binary characteristics (e.g., beautiful – ugly, funny - boring) plus indicating their language familiarities, L2 backgrounds, speaker voice liking, demographics and musicality levels. Findings revealed that all factors in complex interplay explain a certain percentage of variance: familiarity and expertise in foreign languages, speaker voice characteristics, phonetic complexity, musical acoustic properties, and finally musical expertise of the listener. The most important discovery was the trade-off between speech tempo and so-called linguistic melody (pitch variance): the faster the language, the flatter/more atonal it is in terms of the pitch (speech melody), making it highly appealing acoustically (sounding beautiful and sexy), but not so melodious in a “musical” sense.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.3389/fnhum.2021.578594
Uncontrolled keywords: phon-esthetics, language attitudes and ideologies, speech melody, speech rate, language perception, cross-linguistic comparison, language learning attitudes, rhythm in language, prosody and intonation perception
Subjects: P Language and Literature
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of English
Depositing User: Vita Kogan
Date Deposited: 26 Feb 2021 12:12 UTC
Last Modified: 14 Nov 2022 23:11 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/86794 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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