Overview
- PLOS ONE paper reports that phonemic and phonotactic composition correlates with both aesthetic ratings and free-recall performance.
- Pseudowords built from David Crystal’s phoneme rankings were designed as highly appealing, intermediate, or unappealing for testing.
- Items designed as highly appealing were recalled most often, whereas participants rated intermediate-designed items as the most appealing.
- Overall, words that participants recalled received higher appeal ratings than those they failed to recall.
- The experiment tested 100 native English speakers and points to potential uses in language learning, marketing, and theories of language change.