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Updated: Jun 13, 2025

Author Spotlight: Investigating the Impact of Emotional Prosodies on Voice Recognition and Perception
Published on: August 9, 2024
DIFFERENTIAL CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE SPECTRO-TEMPORAL AND VOCAL CHARACTERISTICS OF AUDITORY PSEUDOWORDS TO MULTIPLE
Simon Lacey1,2,3, Kaitlyn L Matthews4,5, A M Hoffmann4
1Department of Neurology, Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center & Penn State College of Medicine, Hershey, PA 17033, USA.
Abstract:
Sound symbolism, the idea that the sound of a word alone can convey its meaning, is often studied using auditory pseudowords. For example, people reliably assign the auditory pseudowords "bouba" and "kiki" to rounded and pointed shapes, respectively. Previously we showed that representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) of the shape ratings of auditory pseudowords correlated significantly with RDMs of acoustic parameters reflecting spectro-temporal variations; the ratings also correlated significantly with voice quality features. Here, participants rated auditory pseudowords on scales representing categorical opposites across seven meaning domains, including shape. Examination of the relationships of the perceptual ratings to spectro-temporal and vocal parameters of the pseudowords essentially replicated our previous findings for shape while varying patterns emerged for the other domains. Thus, the spectro-temporal and vocal properties of spoken pseudowords contribute differentially to sound-symbolic mapping depending on the meaning domain.
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