Why Some Names Are Easier to Remember Than Others, According to Science

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Poets and authors know the value of choosing the right words. It’s not always just about communication, but also about setting a tone or presenting a feeling. Words have meaning, but they also have vibes.

Shakespeare famously claimed that a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet, but that turns out not to be the case, according to a new study published in the journal PLOS One. It’s already known that positive emotional responses enhance memory retention but it’s not totally clear how that impacts our understanding of language.

Using a series of made-up words, researchers confirmed that the aesthetic appeal of sounds affects their memorability. Put simply, words might be easier to remember and may even stick around in the language longer, because we think they sound beautiful.

How the shape and sound of words impact how we receive and remember them

The study of sound and its expressive properties is known as phonaesthetics, a term which may have been coined by J. R. R. Tolkien, but the field predates him. One of the most famous examples dates back to the 1920s and is known as the Bouba-Kiki effect. It involves an experiment in which participants are presented with shapes and asked to associate them with words.

In the classic example, participants are shown a smooth shape and a spiky shape (above), and asked to determine which is named Bouba and which is named Kiki. Overwhelmingly, people associate the name Bouba with round, lumpy shapes and Kiki with sharp, spiky shapes. The effect is consistent across demographics. Regardless of age and even native language, people tend to associate certain phonemes with certain aesthetics. Across various studies, nearly 90 percent of participants showed the same preferences.

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In another study, participants were asked to pair antonyms in a foreign language with their English equivalents. For example, they might be given the Japanese words tooi and chikai, then asked to guess which means near and which means far. On average, people make the correct prediction about two-thirds of the time (in case you’re wondering, tooi means far and chikai means near), better than expected from chance alone. It seems that aesthetic associations may impact the evolution of language.

In the new study, led by University of Vienna linguist Theresa Matzinger, researchers designed pseudowords like clisious, smanious, and drikious. Some words were designed to be aesthetically appealing and others less so, using linguist David Crystal’s phoneme ranking.

Study participants, all Native English speakers, were asked to memorize these nonsense words and complete a recall test. Later, they were asked to rank how appealing these pseudowords were. Surprisingly, the results didn’t quite line up with Crystal’s rankings. In fact, words which were designed to be appealing received about the same rank as unappealing words, while words designed to be neutral were ranked as the most appealing. Still, the words which participants ranked as most appealing were also the words which were most easily recalled.

“We found that the words that participants remembered best were also the ones they rated as most beautiful,” explained study author Theresa Matzinger, in a Dec. 4 statement, “but these were not always the words that we, as researchers, had originally designed to be the most beautiful.”

This divergence might be partly because Crystal’s ranking was based on existing words, which can’t be totally separated from their meanings. Meanwhile, the new study crafted novel words which were judged only on the appeal of their sounds.

The results suggest that sounds have aesthetic value separate from their meaning, which impacts their memorability, but that the meaning of words also plays a role in whether we like them or not. The appeal of words may also serve as a driver in the evolution of language and whether certain words stick around from one generation to the next.

“Certain sound patterns may persist in languages because they sound pleasant,” Matzinger suggested. “While others may disappear because we find them less appealing.”

“Whether we remember things better because we find them beautiful,” Matzinger continued, “or find them beautiful because we can remember them more easily, remains an open question.”

You can even make a mysterious threat a little less scary by naming it Jean Jacket. See for yourself in Nope, streaming now on SYFY.