Phonemes Convey Embodied Emotion

We contrast the traditional view that vowel phonemes are neutral, abstract building blocks with an understanding that they convey activities of embodied emotional facial musculature. In theory, the same facial musculature associated with visually recognizable emotional expressions also favors the production of auditorily recognizable sounds. We found a relational commonality in the distribution of phonemes across perceptual, acoustic, and biomechanical metric spaces that maps well onto emotional dimensions of valence and arousal. Specifically, /i:/-sounds (like “Gleam”) are associated with more positive emotional valence than /Ʌ/-sounds (like “Glum”), and /æ/-sounds (like “Wham”) are associated with more arousing emotions than /u:/-sounds (like “Womb). These trends generalize to other languages, across species, occur with both words and pseudo-words, and can be enhanced or inhibited by manipulating facial musculature. These types of acoustic associations complement and integrate with other forms of embodied sound symbolism such as onomatopoeic findings related to bouba-kiki phenomena, but the phoneme-emotion relationship is more robust and provides a stronger functional basis for understanding language development and evolution. The phoneme-emotion relationship provides a potential explanation for why humans originally evolved the ability to so finely discriminate the acoustic phonemic characteristics upon which language is scaffolded. In short, phonemes may initially have effectively served as general acoustic emotion-detection features.