The Gleam-Glum Effect with Pseudo-Words: /i/ vs /Λ/ Phonemes Carry Emotional Valence that Influences Semantic Interpretation

I recently established the gleam-glum effect confirming in both English and Mandarin that words with the /i/ vowel-sound (like “gleam”) are rated more emotionally positive than matched words with the /ʌ/ vowel-sound (like “glum”). Here I confirm that these vowel sounds also influence the semantic perception of monosyllabic pseudo-words. In Experiment 1, 100 participants rated 50 individual /i/ monosyllabic pseudo-words (like “zeech”) as significantly more positive than 50 matched /ʌ/ pseudo-words (like “zuch”), replicating my previous findings with real words. Experiment 2 assessed the gleam-glum effect on pseudo-words using a forced-choice task. Participants (n = 148) were presented with the 50 pairs of pseudo-words used in Experiment 1 and tasked to guess the most likely meaning of each pseudo-word by matching them with one of two meaning words that were either extremely positive or extremely negative in affective valence (Warriner et al., 2013). I found a remarkably robust effect in which every one of the 50 pseudo-word pairs was on average more likely to have the /i/ word matched with the positive meaning word and /ʌ/ word with the negative one (exact binomial test, p < .001, z = 7.94). The findings confirm that the gleam-glum effect facilitates bootstrapping meaning of words from their pronunciations. These findings coupled with previous real word findings (Yu et al., in press), showing not only that the effect encompasses the entire English lexicon but can also be explained with an embodied facial musculature mechanism, is consistent with the idea that sound symbolism may shape vocabulary use of a language over time by influencing semantic perception.