"Words That Feel Good Are Hard to Forget" - Is the "Texture of Sound" More Important Than Meaning? Insights from Pseudo-Word Experiments on the Conditions for Memorable Words

"Somehow Pleasant Words" Were Indeed Easier to Remember

When I hear words like "harmony" or "melody," I feel a pleasant sensation as if the sounds are rolling around in my mouth. Conversely, murky sounds like "drodge" or "bland" somehow feel a bit unpleasant——.

In our daily lives, we react not only to the "meaning" of words but also to the "texture of the sound." However, whether we like a sound because it is pleasant, or it sounds pleasant because we like its meaning has long been an unclear issue.

Taking on this question head-on was a research team led by linguist Theresa Matzinger from the University of Vienna, Austria. In a paper published in PLOS One in December 2025, they artificially created "words that are beautiful only in sound" and examined their memorability.Phys.org

In conclusion, the results indicate that **"words with pleasant sounds are easier to remember."**

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Pseudowords Created to Eliminate Meaning

The key point of this study was the use of "pseudowords" instead of real words.

For example,

• clisious

• smanious

• drikious

These are words that sound like English but do not actually exist. Since they have no meaning, impressions like "cute/hard/syrupy" are almost entirely derived from the sound composition.Phys.org

The research team designed several dozen pseudowords by combining "sounds that should be very pleasant," "moderately pleasant," and "not very pleasant" based on previous materials ranking the beauty of English sounds (Crystal's ranking).

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100 People to Memorize and Recall

The experiment involved 100 native English speakers. The procedure was threefold.Phys.org

1. Learning Phase
   Participants were presented with pseudowords on a screen and through audio and instructed to memorize them as much as possible.

2. Recall Test
   Afterward, they were asked to freely write down the words they remembered.

3. Beauty Evaluation
   Finally, they were asked to rate "how beautiful (pleasant) they felt" each displayed pseudoword was on a 7-point scale, for example.

This approach allowed the researchers to measure the relationship between "which words were frequently recalled" and "which words were felt to be beautiful" without interference from meaning.

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A Discrepancy Between Researchers' Expectations and Participants' Perceptions

The results were somewhat surprising.PLOS Digital Exchange

• Words designed by researchers to be "the most beautiful" were less appealing to participants thanwords set to medium beauty.

• However,the group designed by researchers as "very beautiful" was the most frequently recalled in the memory test.

• Furthermore, overall,the words that were recalled received higher "beauty" ratings than those that were not

In other words,

"Participants' own evaluations" and
"Researchers' preconceived notions of beauty"
"Ease of memory"

These three aspects were found to be subtly misaligned yet interrelated.

Matzinger commented, "The patterns of sound we find beautiful and those that are easy to remember are closely related, but we still don't know which is the cause and which is the effect."Phys.org

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"Is it because it's beautiful that it's memorable, or is it beautiful because it's easy to remember?"

So, which comes first in this relationship?

1. Beauty → Memory
   There is a psychological insight that pleasant emotions enhance memory. Just as you remember enjoyable trips better, "words with pleasant sounds" may be associated with positive emotions, making them more memorable.

2. Memory → Beauty
   On the other hand, people tend to like "what they know well" (mere exposure effect). In language, sound patterns frequently occurring in one's native language are familiar and tend to feel "somehow pleasant."
   In this study, pseudowords that happened to contain many sound combinations frequently appearing in English might have been easier to remember and thus rated as "liked."Phys.org

In reality, these two might be looping like a cycle. **"Pleasant to the ear, so it's remembered → used repeatedly, so it's liked even more"** is the cycle.

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Conversations Likely to Arise on Social Media

This news has already been shared on social media by media outlets and academic accounts worldwide.Phys.org

While it's challenging to comprehensively track specific comments, if this article appears on your timeline, such conversations are likely to unfold.

• Reactions from the Language Community

  "That's why Italian is said to sound 'like singing.'"
  "It seems motivating to start learning vocabulary with 'beautiful words.'"

• Reactions from Marketers and Naming Experts

  "We want to scientifically design product and service names, not just focus on meaning."
  "Experiments like this might back up those 'somehow nice-sounding katakana words.'"

• Skeptical Reactions

  "It's an experiment with 100 people in English, right? It's doubtful if the same results would occur in Japanese."
  "The discomfort with 'moist' seems largely due to its meaning's image."

• Playful Reactions

  "The reason 'my favorite's name' is so easy to remember and makes me want to say it is because the sound is too good."
  "Copies like 'smooth,' 'fluffy,' 'melting' are strong at the word level."

These reactions suggest that perhaps our intuition already knew the results of this study. Social media is always dominated by words that are "easy to say and memorable."

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In Linguistics, It's the World of "Phonaesthetics"

Technically, the field that deals with the beauty of language sounds is called **phonaesthetics**. This paper, in this field,

• demonstrated quantitatively how individual phonemes (p, t, k, etc.)

• and their combinations (syllable and phoneme patterns)

are linked to beauty and further connected to memory.PLOS Digital Exchange

The paper also touches on the connection with sound symbolism (like the bouba/kiki effect). This famous experiment shows that round things are often associated with "bouba" and pointed things with "kiki," indicating thatthe connection between sound and image is not coincidental.

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Is the Same Mechanism at Play in Japanese "Fuwa Fuwa" and "Zaku Zaku"?

As a Japanese speaker, one might wonder, "Does the same thing happen in Japanese?"

In Japanese, there are a large number of onomatopoeic and mimetic words like

• fuwa fuwa, poka poka, sara sara —— sounds that give a soft and pleasant impression

• zara zara, gari gari, doro doro —— sounds that give a rough and heavy impression

Most people can probably intuitively understand "what it feels like" without having the meaning explained.

If a similar pseudoword experiment were conducted with Japanese-sounding sequences,

• words with sounds like "ra," "ma," "na" might be easier to remember

• while words with many voiced sounds like "gu," "zu," "do" might be harder to remember

Such tendencies might be found. Additionally, if dialects and individual differences are considered, cultural characteristics like "this region prefers 'ka' sounds" might also become apparent.

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Practical Edition: Three Areas Changed by "Sound Design" of Words

The research team points out that the findings have applications beyond linguistics.Phys.org

Here, let's highlight three areas where the impact seems significant.

1. Foreign Language Learning

In vocabulary learning apps or wordbooks,

• placing more "pleasant and easy-to-remember words" in the initial stages

• intentionally incorporating sound sequences that learners find "pleasant to say" in pronunciation practice

Such innovations could lower the learning barrier and create an experience where "learning words is a bit fun."

2. Marketing and Naming

Brand names, product names, and catchphrases can be evaluated not only for their meaning but also from the perspective ofphonetic patterns##HTML_TAG_438