People around world associate rolled R with a jagged line, study finds
People around world associate rolled R with a jagged line, study finds
www.theguardian.com
People around world associate rolled R with a jagged line, study finds
9 comments
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I’m guessing it’s to do with the perturbed waveform. Someone should do a followup study to see whether any other sounds with similar characteristics(i.e. an idling car engine, a TR-808 drum machine handclap) would have similar associations.
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I think that this is most likely the case:
In the audio for this spectrogram I've pronounced [rä arä lä älä]. Even with all background noise, it's obvious how smoother the [l] is in comparison with [r] - in one you're simply redirecting the airflow laterally, in another you're "turning" it on and off, by hitting the alveolar ridge with the tongue.
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Palikúr
I'd never heard of this language - Palikúr is an indigenous South American language spoken in Brazil and French Guiana (only 1500 speakers).
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i want to know what "jagged" means here. rolled Rs are too soft to form the "jagged" characteristic i imagine from a T sound. i see a rolled R as more of a rectified sine wave, half-rounded.
then again if the other line was completely flat...
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Jagged in this case can be understood as zig-zagging between high/strong and low/weak. It does describe [r] well - check the spectrogram that I've shared in the other comment, note how it alternates dark bands (louder) and lighter bands (quieter), in a way that [l] or the nearby vowel wouldn't.
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yeah see, that's not the line i would draw for what it feels like.
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9 comments
I always wondered if the Bouba/Kiki effect was reflected in the shape of the associated letters, or if it was just a coincidence.
I can’t think of any writing systems that associate an “r” sound with a jagged-line character, though.
The bouba-kiki-effect has been observed in languages without writing systems
Yeah, I was assuming any influence would go the other way (i.e., people make letters that remind them of the sounds).