Here’s a curious fact: the way a word sounds might determine whether you remember it. Not its meaning, not how useful it is, but simply how pleasant it sounds rolling off your tongue.
Theresa Matzinger, a linguist at the University of Vienna, stumbled onto this connection while testing completely made-up words. Words like clisious, smanious, and drikious. Nonsense syllables with no definitions, no baggage, no associations. Just pure sound. And what she found challenges how we think about memory itself.
We’ve long known that some words just feel good to say. Harmony, lullaby, melody. These slide out smoothly, almost musically. Others, like drudge, blunt, or moist, seem to scrape against something in our mouths or minds. But was it the sound we were reacting to, or the meanings we’d learned to attach to those sounds?
The Experiment: Beauty Without Meaning
Matzinger’s approach was elegant. Strip away meaning entirely. Create pseudowords, design some to sound theoretically appealing, some neutral, some harsh. Then see what happens.
Her team recruited 100 English speakers and put them through a simple sequence. First, learn these nonsense words. Then recall as many as you can. Finally, rate how beautiful each one sounds. The approach builds on decades of research into sound symbolism, the idea that speech sounds carry their own meanings independent of the words they form.
The participants sat through the learning phase, hearing and seeing words like sleemious and gruhious flash across screens. Each word appeared six times. Later came the memory test.
“We found that the words that participants remembered best were also the ones they rated as most beautiful, but these were not always the words that we, as researchers, had originally designed to be the most beautiful.”
That second part is the kicker. The researchers thought they knew which sounds would be perceived as beautiful, based on earlier work. They were wrong. Previous studies had likely been measuring reactions to meanings, not sounds. This time, with meaning stripped away, the true aesthetic qualities of phonemes emerged.
The finding connects to broader research showing that cross-linguistic patterns exist in sound-meaning associations. Across 245 language families, certain phonemes tend to cluster around certain concepts. Not randomly, but systematically.
Memory Follows Beauty
The memory results told a clear story. Appealing pseudowords were recalled 53 percent of the time. Neutral ones, 41 percent. Unappealing ones, just 36 percent.
Think about that. A difference of nearly 20 percentage points in recall, driven entirely by the aesthetic quality of sounds that meant nothing. No semantic associations, no personal memories tied to the words. Just the raw sensory experience of hearing them.
“Whether we remember things better because we find them beautiful, or find them beautiful because we can remember them more easily, remains an open question.”
Matzinger’s uncertainty here is honest. The causal arrow could point either direction. Or both. Perhaps certain sound combinations feel familiar because they mirror patterns in our native language, making them simultaneously more pleasing and more memorable. The brain likes patterns it recognizes, after all.
This aligns with extensive research demonstrating that emotional arousal enhances memory consolidation. When the amygdala lights up in response to something emotionally significant, it signals the hippocampus to strengthen encoding. Could aesthetic pleasure trigger a similar mechanism? The data suggests yes.
The phenomenon also mirrors the famous bouba-kiki effect, first documented in 1929. Show people two shapes, one rounded, one jagged. Ask which is bouba and which is kiki. About 95 percent will match bouba with the curve and kiki with the spike. This works across cultures, in Tamil and English, among toddlers and adults. The human brain, it seems, hears shapes in sounds.
When Theory Meets Reality
But here’s where things got interesting. The researchers had designed their pseudowords based on earlier predictions about which phonemes would sound most appealing. High on the list: continuants like l and s, nasals like m and n, front vowels like i and e.
Participants didn’t cooperate. The words designed to be most appealing received middling ratings. The neutral words, surprisingly, topped the charts. The pattern formed an inverted U-curve, with the extremes scoring lowest and the middle scoring highest.
Why? Possibly because familiarity breeds comfort, but extreme familiarity breeds boredom. Psychological research has long shown that moderate novelty tends to be most aesthetically pleasing. Too familiar feels dull. Too strange feels uncomfortable. The sweet spot lives in between.
There’s also the question of what familiarity means in the context of individual phonemes. Research already shows that sound symbolism creates patterns in real words. Words for small things contain more high front vowels. Words for large things favor low back vowels. Over time, these patterns become embedded in our linguistic intuitions.
What This Means
The implications stretch across multiple domains. Language teachers might leverage phonetic appeal to make vocabulary stick. Marketers already do this, choosing brand names that sound right for their products. Ever notice how luxury brands favor certain sounds?
But the deeper significance touches on language evolution itself. If pleasant-sounding patterns are easier to remember and transmit, they would have a selective advantage over generations. Appealing phoneme combinations would spread, persist, become embedded in the lexicon. Harsh combinations would fade.
Studies have shown that memory recollection enhances aesthetic experience, particularly when associations arise spontaneously. The relationship between memory and beauty might be bidirectional, each reinforcing the other in a feedback loop.
This would explain why languages aren’t just arbitrary symbol systems. They carry aesthetic dimensions, shaped by the same cognitive processes that make us prefer certain melodies, certain visual patterns, certain textures. Language isn’t just functional. It’s also beautiful. And beauty, it turns out, helps us remember.
Of course, questions remain. The study used English speakers and English-based phoneme combinations. Would the patterns hold across radically different languages? How much does orthography influence perception when we see words written down? What happens in purely auditory contexts?
And there’s that chicken-and-egg problem Matzinger mentioned. Do we remember beautiful things better, or do we find memorable things beautiful? The answer probably depends on complex interactions between attention, emotion, and consolidation processes that neuroscientists are still mapping.
What’s clear is that the relationship exists. Sound has aesthetic power independent of meaning. That power affects memory. And memory, ultimately, shapes which patterns survive in language and which ones disappear.
Next time you’re learning vocabulary in a foreign language, pay attention to which words feel good to say. Chances are, those are the ones you’ll remember.
PLOS One: 10.1371/journal.pone.0336597
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