[lit-ideas] Re: The Three Grices -- or Grice's Adventures in Popperland
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 09:14:10 -0400 (EDT)
Alleged 'inherent' (as opposed to what?) emotional (aesthetic?) quality of
human (homo sapiens) 'speech' sounds (phonemes -- cfr. phone/phoneme and
the definition of 'phoneme' as INVOLVING, per necessity 'meaning' or
'semantic quality' -- It's the fact that 'put' differs in meaning from 'pot'
that
'u' and 'o' are different phonemes in English. They may be treated as the
same 'sound' in a different 'idiolect'.
We are discussing an experimental result which caught the interest (if it
can be caught) of Phatic. The experimental result is excerpted below. It got
D. Ritchie into tubing about words which are tinny and words which are
woody, which was funny.
In a message dated 10/29/2013 2:27:20 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
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.
---
I was thinking that perhaps the authors should have used 'aesthetic' rather
than 'emotional'. But there are other flaws, too. The idea that a puppy
(or photograph thereof) is positive while a non-puppy is negative seems
negative. On top of that, they are not saying that 100% of those who took the
test reacted the way they should have if the result were 'analytic' (a
priori). A similar result is cited regarding graduates in a Lancashire
university
who had to separate statements into 'analytic' or 'synthetic' and most
failing ("Spring follows Winter").
So, I would think that a philosopher should proceed differently.
The propositions have to be made clearer. At one point the experimenters
talk of their result as refuting the idea that words can be onomatopoetic,
i.e. that there is nothing like an indexical sign, or a word what means that
it means by the mere quality of its constituting phones. This seems
simplistic.
Ever since Plato's Cratylus, onomatopoeia has figured large in
philosophical studies of language.
There may be other flaws too.
---- A Gricean or Popperian reading should proceed once the clarifications
are made. Or not.
Cheers,
Speranza
B. Myers-Schulz, M. Pujara, R. C. Wolf and M. Koenigs,
"Inherent emotional quality of human speech sounds"
Cognition and emotion, vol. 27 -- available at:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23286242
"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'."
Phatic's editorial:
"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""
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
