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 partici...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs