Abstract

The voice conveys a wealth of information about the speaker’s age, dominance, emotional state, etc. Despite great progress in describing how this information is encoded acoustically, a general theory of why particular acoustic features convey particular meanings is still missing. I have focused on the role of three fundamental cognitive mechanisms in shaping the form of vocal communicative signals, namely: (1) cross-modal associations, (2) auditory attention, and (3) esthetic preferences. In this talk, I provide an overview of the main results for these three modules, followed by a more detailed presentation of one particular study, “Do some languages sound more beautiful than others?” (Anikin et al., 2023).

Italian is sexy, German is rough—but how about Páez or Tamil? Are there universal phonesthetic judgments based purely on the sound of a language, or are preferences attributable to language-external factors such as familiarity and cultural stereotypes? We collected 2,125 recordings of 228 languages from 43 language families, including 5 to 11 speakers of each language to control for personal vocal attractiveness, and asked 820 native speakers of English, Chinese, or Semitic languages to indicate how much they liked these languages. We found a strong preference for languages perceived as familiar, even when they were misidentified, a variety of cultural-geographical biases, and a preference for breathy female voices. The scores by English, Chinese, and Semitic speakers were weakly correlated, indicating some cross-cultural concordance in phonesthetic judgments, but overall there was little consensus between raters about which languages sounded more beautiful, and average scores per language remained within ±2% after accounting for confounds related to familiarity and voice quality of individual speakers. None of the tested phonetic features—the presence of specific phonemic classes, the overall size of phonetic repertoire, its typicality and similarity to the listener’s first language—were robust predictors of pleasantness ratings, apart from a possible slight preference for nontonal languages. While population-level phonesthetic preferences may exist, their contribution to perceptual judgments of short speech recordings appears to be minor compared to purely personal preferences, the speaker’s voice quality,and perceived resemblance to other languages culturally branded as beautiful or ugly.

Biography

Andrey Anikin is a postdoctoral researcher working at Lund University Cognitive Science (Sweden) and at the ENES lab at the University of Saint-Etienne (France). His field of research is nonverbal vocal communication in humans and other noisy animals. He is interested in how the voice can convey information over and above a linguistic code – for example, by using a rough voice quality, nonverbal vocalizations such as laughing and screaming, etc. He studies these acoustic phenomena from a cognitive and biological perspective, with particular focus on sensory biases and auditory attention. The objective of this research is to shed light on the evolution of vocal communication and its universal features across human cultures and animal species.