Effective communication lies at the heart of human connection. It helps us collaborate with each other, solve problems and build relationships. And communicating clearly is a major consideration for most of us in most aspects of life.
But what if the way some words sound makes them more impactful in communication?
New research I coauthored, published in Cognition, suggests this might be the case. And it could help us all understand how to communicate better with each other.
What makes some words special?
Psycholinguistics is the study of the use and acquisition of language. A key concept in the field is known as “surprisal”. Surprisal is a measure of how expected something – for example, a word in a sentence or a sound in a word – is relative to what typically happens in the language.
All English words are built from the same vowels and consonants and follow the same rules of combination. But despite this, not all words are created equal. Words made up of unusual sequences of vowels and consonants sound more surprising to listeners. That makes them stand out in speech and affects how we process them.
We use information theory to calculate how surprising a word is. Information theory works by calculating how much information each speech sound contributes to an individual word.
Speech sounds that occur in highly predictable environments contribute relatively little information. These include sequences like /st/ as in “stick” and “stone”, and /an/ as in “can” and “and”. This is because lots of other words share the same sequences of sounds.
Speech sounds that occur in unusual environments contribute much more information. These include /koi/ like in “coil” and “coin”, and /sv/ as in “svelte” and “svabite”. This is because more unusual sequences of sounds are shared with fewer words in the lexicon.
Highly vivid words are more surprising
We applied an information theoretical analysis to data from a very large corpus of 51 million words of spoken American English – many of which were repeated – taken from movie and television subtitles.
This allowed us to assign each word in English a score showing how surprising its sounds are in English.
We then took these scores and cross-referenced them with the results of a battery of word-processing experiments. These included an auditory lexical decision task which required participants to decide whether what they heard were real words or not; a reading task; and several memory recognition tasks.
This revealed that highly vivid words – those that are very specific or concrete – are more surprising. It also revealed that both vividness and surprisal improves memory recognition.
For example, words like “dog” and “flower” are more vivid than words like “stun” and “plot”, and they also sound more surprising.
Using highly surprising word forms ensures their meaning is processed deeply and remembered better.
Challenging modern linguistics
The fact that highly vivid words sound more surprising than other words challenges the assumption in modern linguistics that the relationship between a word and its meaning is arbitrary and conventionalised.
For example, while English speakers use the sound sequence /tri:/ to refer to the concept of a “tree”, French speakers use the sequence /aʁbʁə/ (arbre) just as successfully. This shows that language users agree on what names to use within each speech community. This is what it means for language to be conventionalised.
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