ArticleCognitive science2026
U.S. English-Speaking Children and Adults Exhibit a "Gleam-Glum" Sound Symbolic Effect Linking Phonemic Vowel Sounds With Emotional Valence.
Article in Cognitive science, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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4 authors.
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Abstract
We tested a recently-found sound symbolic effect, the gleam-glum effect, in which words with the [i]-phoneme (like "gleam") are perceived as emotionally more positive than matched words with the [Ʌ]-phoneme (like "glum"). We extend prior work and verify this effect using a novel online pseudoword-to-scene matching task, testing U.S. English-speaking adults (n = 105) and 5- to 7-year-old children (n = 52). Participants heard pairs of matched [i]- versus [Ʌ]-monosyllabic pseudowords (e.g., "zeem" versus "zum") and assigned them to cartoon scenes exhibiting contrasting emotional valence (positive versus negative). These results provide the first empirical evidence that the gleam-glum effect is robust across both young children and adults, with the effect magnitude somewhat less in children of this age compared to adults. Our findings confirm that the gleam-glum effect is already strong at an early age and holds promise of being an important mechanism for language comprehension, language use, and language learning.
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