>McEvoy: "Even if we accept phonemes have an “emotional quality” “separate from [their] word meaning or the tone or volume of [their] utterance”, that would not mean the explanation for that “emotional quality” was a purely W1 level of explanation [“conveyed purely by…sound frequencies”]: where a ‘ nail-scraping sound’ is merely a W1 entity, it does not follow that the “ emotional meaning” of that sound is also merely a W1 entity – it may depend on W2 and W3 factors. It would not mean that the “emotional quality” was “of their own” in the sense that it was inherent or intrinsic to that W1 entity qua merely that W1 entity – rather than as an entity with W2 and W3 ‘ effects and affects’, where those ‘effects and affects’ may not be explained purely in terms of W1." Emotional surely belongs in W2.> An "emotional" state may well be a W2 state: however, the above is about the explanation of an "emotional quality":- even if we convert this to mean a W2 "emotional state", it is open to explain this in any one or other of W1, W2 or W3 terms. So my "emotional state" given my toothache may be explained using a W1 level of explanation referring to the caries in my tooth and its physiological affect on my central nervous system etc., at a W2 level given my W2 consciousness of this pain, and at a W3 level given my W2 awareness of my W3-dependent situation in so far as this might include the likelihood of my seeing a dentist etc. and how this awareness may impact on my "emotional state". So a W2 "emotional state" may be explained in terms involving W1, W2 and W3. We could upbraid the authors for some kind of 'category mistake' in speaking of a merely W1 entity like wave-frequencies as if these have some "emotional meaning" in themselves as wave-frequencies - and it may be fair to do so. However, my focus was not so much on locating "emotional meaning" ontologically (say within a W2, W1 or W3) but on the extent to which "emotional meaning" is explicable in merely W1, W2 or W3 terms - and implicitly I am defending an interactionist position where W12&3 may all play a part in the explanation of "emotional meaning" just as all may play a part in the explanation of a W2 "emotional state". There may well be a kind of 'category mistake' at work in how the authors talk of the "emotional quality" of wave-frequencies, but this 'category mistake' is perhaps due to their obliviousness to W123 distinctions - and it is this obliviousness that is the fundamental flaw in their paper. Once this flaw is seen, the limits of their results becomes apparent - and it is apparent how problematic it is to think that they are anywhere near to demonstrating that the "emotional meaning" or "emotional quality" of wave-frequencies is a purely W1 affair (in terms of explanation), though they seem to think they are well on the road to showing this. Donal W3 is a different 'world' and some say that in fact qualia -- e.g. the sense datum of perceiving a different 'tone' to the utterance of 'thonner' -- can only be 'reduced' (via supervenience) to a world-3 concoction, in a somewhat artificial way. As the poet say, "a kiss is just a kiss" --- but a world-3 description of the emotional impact of the 'noise' (phone?) in kissing is "not just a kiss". Or not. On Tuesday, 29 October 2013, 15:49, "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx> wrote: 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html