Schedule 77. StuTS

Eating is a multisensory experience, including vision, smell, touch, hearing and taste. The relationship between taste and other means of perception is an area that has been researched from a linguistic, psychological and marketing perspective. Its connection to sounds and language provides insight into the emergence of language and the relationship between signifiant and signifié.
The talk is inspired by Ngo et al. (2011) who investigated the sound and shape symbolism of chocolate. Their results suggest that chocolate with higher cacao content is associated with angular shapes and high-pitched nonce words, whereas sweeter chocolate is associated with round shapes and lower-pitched words. The purely visual presentation of the stimuli could have led to an angularity bias. Klink (2000), on the other hand, found that people would expect a lemonade with a brand name having higher-frequency frontal vowels to taste more bitter than a brand name containing lower-frequency back vowels.
The study presented aims to investigate the relationship between vowel position and the taste perception of a bitter-sweet continuum. As previous research has produced conflicting results, a new method was chosen for this study. The participants assigned auditory stimuli to taste stimuli to research a correlation between bitterness and back vowels.

Bibliography:

Crisinel, A.-S., & Spence, C. (2010). A Sweet Sound? Food Names Reveal Implicit Associations between Taste and Pitch. Perception, 39(3), 417–425. https://doi.org/10.1068/p6574

Klink, R. R. (2000). Creating Brand Names With Meaning: The Use of Sound Symbolism. Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice 9 (2), 27–34.

Ngo, M. K., Misra, R., & Spence, C. (2011). Assessing the shapes and speech sounds that people associate with chocolate samples varying in cocoa content. Food Quality and Preference, 22(6), 567–572. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2011.03.009.

Pathak, A., & Calvert, G. A. (2021). Sooo Sweeet! Presence of Long Vowels in Brand Names Lead to Expectations of Sweetness. Behavioral Sciences, 11(12). https://doi.org/10.3390/bs11020012.

Wang, Q. J., Wang, S., & Spence, C. (2016). “Turn Up the Taste”: Assessing the Role of Taste Intensity and Emotion in Mediating Crossmodal Correspondences between Basic Tastes and Pitch. Chemical Senses, 41(4), 345–356. https://doi.org/10.1093/chemse/bjw007.

Info

Day: 2025-05-15
Start time: 14:40
Duration: 00:30
Room: GWZ 2.116
Track: Phonetics/Phonology
Language: en

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