[lit-ideas] The Three Grices -- or Grice's Adventures in Popperland
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 11:49:14 -0400 (EDT)
My last post today.
For the record, the Borges quote:
http://www.zenosbooks.com/our-book-blogs/2672-05-18-2013-selected-poems-by-j
orge-luis-borges.html
‘The roots of language are irrational and of a magical satire. The Dane
who pronounced the name of Thor or the Saxon who uttered the name of Thunor
did not know whether these words represented the god of thunder or the
rumble that is beard after the lightning flash. Poetry wants to return to that
ancient magic. Without fixed rules, it progresses in a hesitant, daring way,
as if moving in darkness. Poetry is a mysterious chess, whose chessboard
and whose pieces change as in a dream and over which I shall be gazing after
I am dead.’
-- which may relate to this experimental study referred to by T. Fjeld that
McEvoy was commenting on.
Cheers,
Speranza
----
_torgeir_fjeld@yahoo.no_ (mailto:torgeir_fjeld@xxxxxxxx) , in "Language
isn't arbitrary, convention based after all". "A bit of numerological
mysticism can do wonders for the academic branch known as Linguistic
Patricide,
innit?" phatic muttered. It was a dark and gloomy night at the No Holds
Barred cafe in uptown Florida. "You've been reading the Digest again, 'aven't
ya," responded Beanieman despondently. phatic nodded, hesitantly. "Why it's
apt - psycho-acoustically speaking - that Darth Vader wasn't called Barth
Vaber""
"The relationship between the meaning of a word and the letter strings of
which it is comprised is usually thought to be arbitrary. That is, the
meaning of a word is dictated by convention and the emotional tone of the
speaker. Strip these away and the sounds of the letter groupings themselves -
known as phonemes - are generally considered meaningless. At least that's been
a popular view for some time. But now a study has been published that
challenges this account. Blake Myers-Schulz and his colleagues show that the
shift in sound from some phonemes to others carries emotional meaning of its
own, quite independent from word meanings or tone of voice."
"Human speech creates sound at different frequencies. Myers-Schulz and his
team focused on the changes in certain frequency peaks in speech - known as
formants - as nonsense words were spoken. Specifically, they divided
nonsense words into those in which the first two formants went from low to
high
(e.g. bupaba, pafabi, mipaba) and those in which this sound shift was
reversed, going high to low (e.g. dugada, tatoku, gadigu). They were matched
on
many other sound features, such as plosives, nasality, intonation and
volume. Thirty-two adult participants were shown pairs of these nonsense words
on a computer screen, one of which always went low to high, the other high
to low (in terms of formant shifts). Together with the words, two pictures
were shown, one positive, one negative (e.g. a cute puppy and a snarling
dog). The participants' job was to allocate the two nonsense words to the two
pictures in the way that seemed most appropriate. The key finding was that
80 per cent of the time, they matched the word that had the low-high sound
shift with the positive picture and the high-to-low word with the negative
picture."
"It was a similar story when 20 more adult participants performed the same
task but with the words spoken by a computer programme rather than shown
visually. In this case, they matched the low-to-high nonsense words with the
positive pictures on 65 per cent of occasions - still far more often than
you'd expect based on chance alone. The findings suggest that strings of
phonemes (the sounds that comprise words) have an emotional quality of their
own, quite separate from any word meaning or the tone or volume of an
utterance. This emotional meaning is conveyed purely by the acoustic
properties
of the word as the sound frequencies change from one phoneme to the next.
There could be intriguing real-life applications for this research in terms
of marketing and PR because the implication is that some words convey
positive emotion simply by virtue of their acoustic properties, above and
beyond
any literal word meaning. "Even in artistic contexts, such as film and
literature, these acoustic principles could be applied to evoke a particular
emotional subtext," the researchers said. "Indeed our data suggest that
'Darth Vader' is an acoustically more appropriate name for an intergalactic
miscreant than 'Barth Vaber'."
Reference: Myers-Schulz B, Pujara M, Wolf RC and Koenigs M (2013). Inherent
emotional quality of human speech sounds. Cognition and emotion, 27 (6),
1105-13 PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23286242
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