Front and Back Vowels in Linguistics, Page 1
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John Milbury-Steen, Front and Back Vowels in Linguistics, page 1 Front and Back Vowels in Linguistics Sound Symbolism: Contrast Studies Based on Nonsense Words This article discusses findings about front and back vowel symbolism in linguistic research. One tradition of research on this subject is to show someone an object (often a novel object) and ask the person to choose which of two words differing only in backness of vowels would be the better name for that object. The best researched duality is little-large. As far as I know, this research began with Sapir in 1929. He showed subjects pictures of two tables that differed only in size, and asked them to choose which one was mil and which was mal (pronounced like "mahl” with the “a” of “father”). They tended to think that the larger table should be called mal. Needless to say, but has been said (Thompson 2011), this kind of experiment suffers from “strong demand characteristics:” in other words, you are asking the subject to confirm a hypothesis too overtly presented. The two things differ in size; the two words differ in vowel. Duh! Leading the witness. However, it does generate useful data, in my opinion, because it does reveal to what extent the witness is willing to be led. Most subjects will give the larger object a name containing a back vowel. More reliable experiments give the subjects a large number of word pairs to compensate for the fact that a single pair may have associations that bias the subject one way or another. It has been observed (Thompson 2011) that mil sounds a lot like the prefix in “millimeter,” so it denotes smallness already, which spoils what it is supposed to connote. And mal might remind the subject of “evil,” which is A Big Thing. Sapir investigated only one word pair, but his study was a pioneering one. The typical experiment is to present a subject many pairs of nonsense words differing only in one vowel phoneme and ask which word refers to a larger thing. For example, in one early experiment (Newman 1933), about 600 subjects of different ages were given pairs of nonsense words for horses. The researcher pronounced the word pairs. The subjects did not have to figure out the pronunciation by reading. Then the subjects checked a box to indicate which one referred to the bigger horse, for example, gleppa or gloapa. (By the way, overwhelmingly, the subjects thought that a gloapa was a big horse, but a gleppa was a small one.) The results, the averages, if we translate them into “gl_pa” values (but there were many contrasting nonsense pairs), arranged from the smallest to the largest horse: glippa, gleighpa, gleppa, glaepa, | glahpa, glewpa, glawpa, gloapa (In my phonetic spelling, “eigh” as in “weigh,” “ae” as in “cat,” “ah” as in “father,” “ew” as in “dew,” “aw” as in “raw.”) The extra spacing shows relatively wide gaps in the subjects’ perception of size. I have inserted the vertical line character to show the separation between front and back vowels as Aei- our defines them. The front-vowel horses on the left are Shetland-pony horses in a petting zoo; the back-vowel horses on the right are Clydesdales that pull the Budweiser beer wagon. The vowels in the latter group require a larger oral cavity, the researchers note. This supports my characterization of the mouth as a microcosm: the size of the mouth when pronouncing the vowel of the nonsense word suggests the size of the referent. The mouth solipsistically projects its size on whatever it is naming. John Milbury-Steen, Front and Back Vowels in Linguistics, page 2 Contrast in size symbolism in regard to front and back vowels in nonsense words has been widely reported. For example, in another experiment (Thompson 2011), the subject was shown a weird looking figure called a “greeble.” It looks like a stack of three globs with a few protuberances. Each greeble, always the same shape, was shown in a pastoral setting: in a pasture beside a cow. (Wow. “A greeble in a pastoral setting.” These experiments often have a quirky winsomeness.) The cow was there for scale because the greebles varied in size, from half as tall as the cow’s back leg, to three times the height of the cow. There were five different sizes. The subject had to read (not hear) five possible names for each greeble and choose which one he thought was the best. These names were all of the form CVCVCV, where C is a consonant and V is a vowel – for example, “wodolo,” which turns out to be a huge greeble, or “kitete” (three syllables), which is a very small one. Counting both consonants and vowels, each of which can be little or big, with a value of 0 or 1 respectively, each greeble name implicitly had a bigness score between 0 and 6. The letters a, u, and o, which correspond to the phonemes ah, oo and oh, were considered “large sounding,” while i and e, which, are the vowels of sit and set, were considered “small sounding”. Of course, the researchers knew the score for each vowel, but the subjects did not. When forty-seven subjects assigned a name to each of 20 greebles, the results were as predicted. The bigness score of the chosen names varied with the size of the greeble, thus demonstrating that size symbolism applies not just to the two extremes of the scale, but to intermediate positions on it, as well. (The symbolism is “graded.”) These results apply to both vowels and consonants, but, considering vowels separately, the researchers state that their results agree with former studies where, as the size of a “novel object” increases, subjects choose more and more back vowels. In short, the bigger the object, the backer the vowels. Advertisers have caught on to this. One study (Coulter and Coulter 2010) used size symbolism of front and back vowels to trick customers into choosing the more expensive ice cream cone. The setup is this. The normal price of the ice cream cone is $10.00, which I personally think is rather pricey. You show the subject two ads, identical in format, graphics and font, except that ad A gives a discounted price of $7.66 and ad B gives a discounted price of $7.22. You have to get the subject to repeat these prices out loud so that he processes them in an auditory way. Then you distract him a while, then you ask him later which ice cream cone he wants to buy. He will more likely tell you the first! Why? Because in ad A, the price ends in “sixty-six”, and the i’s are front vowels, connoting smallness (here, smallness of price), whereas in ad B, the price end in “two” which has a back vowel, connoting bigness (of price). Ironically, of the ten non-zero digits, the smallest ones, “one” and “two,” (also “four”) have bigness-connoting back vowels, whereas the bigger ones have littleness-connoting front vowels. The trick is to get the consumer to process the price acoustically, not visually or conceptually. The ice cream cone isn’t cheaper, but it sounds cheaper. (In this experiment, consonants also played a role.) Frankly, I am not sure how to apply size symbolism to Aei-our. Would this mean that the verse line gets increasingly weighty, heavier, heftier as it falls to its end? After all, big, heavy things fall with the biggest thump or clunk! Increase of size might suggest increase in weight: a fall towards the sluggish and torpid. Big, heavy things fall better than light things, so if your verse is going to fall, you might as well use “heavy” vowels at the end of the line. In regard to size symbolism, I cannot help mentioning some real English words. I take birds as an indicative example, because the sound they make in English is roughly correlated with their size. Little birds cheep, peep and squeak, middle sized birds squawk, while big birds caw and go tu-wit-to-woo or hoo-hoo. Likewise, little dogs go yip-yip, but big, ferocious animals roar, snarl, growl, and snort. Studies of bird and fish names in certain languages of the Amazon show that small birds and fish tend to have John Milbury-Steen, Front and Back Vowels in Linguistics, page 3 names using front vowels; big birds and fish, back vowels (Berlin), even when you control for onomatopoeic effects for the sounds they make. The other contrast that comes up often in the nonsense word studies is that between bright and dark. The methodology is the same: this was the second part of Newman’s experiment. The researcher read two nonsense words, such as “laebi” or “lewbi,” and asked the subjects to choose which one was darker (as well as which one was bigger). There were 226 pairs of two-syllable words, quite a lengthy list for a poor subject to work through, requiring 452 decisions! The difference in vowel could occur in the first or the second syllable. This variety was intended “to prevent, as far as possible, a deadening of the [subjects’] attention,” as the researcher delightfully says. I guess it was pretty boring. I suppose, however, that a large sampling of words was needed in order to compensate for extraneous associations. For example, in the pair “laebi-lewbie,” I would suppose that the diminutive ending is definitely an interference, as well as association with labs (depending on your attitude towards chemistry or medical testing) and lube in various contexts, erotic and automotive.