Why 'piss' is ruder than 'pee'? The role of sound in affective meaning making
Fig 1
A) Words in the normative database (BAWL) were segmented and coded for the presence or absence of a given phoneme (here exemplified by the phoneme /t/). The phonemes were analyzed one-by-one to determine their potential effect on valence and arousal ratings. The potential affective effect caused by each single phoneme (i.e. PAV) was computed as the average of valence or arousal ratings of words containing this specific phoneme. The PAP of each word was calculated as the average of all its PAVs. B) Words were synthesized and their extracted acoustic features were used in two multiple linear regression models as predictors for the PAP of arousal (right) and valence (left). The acoustic variables (11 in total) accounted for 27.9% and 23.7% of the variance in PAParo and PAPval respectively (study 1).