Some words brush the mind like velvet. Words like love, halcyon, or starlight. Others make us cringe, such as moist. Most of us feel this instinctively. But can the aesthetics of a word be separated from its meaning?
Recently, a pair of researchers from Vienna, Theresa Matzinger and David Košić, set out to answer this question, and to find out how the appeal of certain words might influence how we remember them. What they discovered could tell us something about why some languages seem more beautiful than others, why some brand names charm consumers, which syllables language learners grasp first, and how languages shift and adapt over time.
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To run their experiment, Matzinger and Košić invented 12 English-sounding words. These were designed to sound appealing, neutral, or unappealing, according to criteria defined in the 1990s by prominent linguist and phonetics expert David Crystal. They then asked 100 native English speakers to try to memorize the new terms.
All pseudowords had three syllables. They started with a cluster of consonants followed by a vowel and a single consonant and ended in the suffix -ious. The researchers flashed each word on a screen six times for a period of 3 seconds, while also playing an audio recording of the word in the background. Participants were asked to repeat the word aloud each time it appeared.
Behold the pseudowords, slotted into the category they were designed to fit. Are any of these words truly appealing you might wonder?
APPEALING:
clisious
snelious
sleemius
smanious
NEUTRAL:
creetious
kridious
drikious
drutious
UNAPPEALING:
krauious
twuhious
dwougious
gruhious
The words look—and sound—like linguistic chimeras hatched in a lab, but that was the point: stripped of meaning, they were intended to reveal the naked aesthetics of sound. After introducing them, the researchers asked the participants to recall them and to rate their aesthetic appeal on a 7-point scale.
The results surprised Matzinger and Košić: The mind liked one set of sounds, but memory preferred another. The words designed to be moderately appealing were found to be most pleasant by the participants. But the pseudowords that were designed to be most appealing were most easily remembered. Something about their shape enhanced memory.
The findings, published in PLOS One, suggest that beauty in language may operate on two distinct levels in the brain: one that resides in our conscious awareness, and another that works quietly beneath it. If so, the words we remember best may not be the ones we think we like, but the ones whose rhythms resonate deeper in the architecture of the mind. 
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Lead image: leksandr Drypsiak / Shutterstock
