Why 'Tiny' Sounds Smaller Than 'Huge.' Nixing the Horrid 'Of.' Kokopelli.
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The Relationship Between Vowel Size and Emotions
There's been a steady stream of work that's pointed to a link between certain sounds and a person's perception of the properties of objects like their size or shape. For instance, in an early experimental study by Edward Seper, made up words were used to refer to a table. When told the table was mall, subjects identified the table as large, while when it was referred to as mill they associated instead with a small table. Since his early work, this vowel-sized correlation has been replicated extensively. Later studies have tried to tease out both which sounds seem to trigger specific associations, and what they seem to symbolize.
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