Our Voice: What We Express Beyond Words

1. Baby karaoke

From birth, voices have a special attraction for us. Around the globe, mothers and fathers have the beautiful habit of singing to their babies. And this acoustic connection actually lifts the listening little person’s mood and promotes their well-being, as a research team from Yale University recently demonstrated. 110 parents and their months-old babies took part. Half of the parents received training in which they were encouraged to sing through songbooks, videos and newsletters.

For four weeks, all parents recorded their little one’s moods several times a day. Result: The babies in the training group were less whiny, and not just immediately after the audition. But as it turned out, the parents in the control group also often sang something to their child, without any prompting or instructions, and thus instinctively contributed to their well-being.

Conversely, babies also love to babble to their parents and others. The vocal melody is an important source of communication – even later, when the children have long been able to speak, as a Spanish-American research group demonstrated. 273 adults listened to the voices of seven to eight-year-old girls and boys who, for example, philosophized about why the sun hides behind clouds on some days. As it turned out, the listeners relied solely on the voice when assessing the child’s emotional state. Only when a judgment about cognitive maturity was required did the adults consult the content of what was said.

2. Global signals

The appeal “Peoples, hear the signals!” is superfluous in that at least basic sound signals are not only heard but also intuitively understood all over the world across the estimated 7,000 existing languages. A team of linguists and bioacoustics led by Maia Ponsonnet has studied vowels in exclamations like “Hey!” in 131 languages. or “Ui!” as well as phonetically examined in “non-linguistic vocalizations” such as screaming and sobbing. For the latter, the team found cross-linguistic similarities: joy, pain and disgust had a similar sound signature everywhere. When it came to exclamations, however, there was only a global pattern for pain: a long drawn out “a”, often coupled with a double sound like “Ai!” or “Ow!”.

An international research group led by Marcus Perlman from the University of Birmingham discovered another cross-linguistic commonality. Their online and field experiments involved 1,030 people with 28 different native languages, including Zulu, Farsi, Daakie and Palikúr. Two speech sounds were played to them, namely a rolled “r” and an “l”. By a large majority, the cross-lingual listening audience assigned the “r” to a jagged line and the “l” to a straight line. The agreement between sound and line was 100 percent for people with Estonian and Finnish mother tongues, and at least 70 percent for Albanian or Mandarin speakers. A century ago, the Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler observed that the fantasy word “Maluma” was usually assigned a round shape, while “Takete” was assigned a jagged shape.

3. Separate brain rooms

The fact that vocal sounds have a common basis of understanding across the world may also be due to the fact that they are not treated in the brain like the learned, culture-specific language. In 2022, a neuroscientific team at the University of Pittsburgh examined eight epilepsy sufferers who had electrodes implanted in their brains to narrow down the source of the disorder and who agreed to take part in a study on this occasion. They played vocal sounds to them – laughing, crying, panting, grunting, yelping – and observed brain activity. As it turned out, it was not the well-known language centers that took over the analysis work, but rather two areas in the auditory cortex that specialize in vocal information. These special units also try to identify characteristics of the person whose voice can be heard, such as their gender, age, mood and personality traits. And that brings us to point four.

4. Resonance

In 2023, an American research group led by Eugene Snyder demonstrated that judging and liking voices depends on the perceived personality. The 401 test subjects listened to a question-and-answer game with a smartphone assistant like Siri or Alexa. Everyone randomly heard either an extraverted or introverted sounding voice. However, some of the test subjects were led to believe that the sound of that very voice corresponded to their own personality. As it turned out, these people rated the supposedly similar voice from the smartphone as more likeable compared to the control group. They obviously found it more enjoyable to interact with someone who they perceived as their equal in terms of voice and personality.

But this also applies in the opposite direction: We not only love it when others sound like us, but we also subliminally ensure that we ourselves sound a little like the people around us. Have you ever found yourself involuntarily imitating a different tone of voice after a conversation with a friend or an interview on television? How did you use your best possible High German to your editorial colleagues, while they jovially slipped into Frankfurterish over a beer with your neighbor?

In linguistics this is called “linguistic convergence”. In 2022, linguist Lacey Wade played subjects a recording of someone speaking with a strong Southern accent. And actually: In a subsequent word guessing game, the people in question said vowels in vocabulary like ride and dine a little southern, it now sounded more like rod and Don. And: They now even gave syllables a southern sound that had not previously appeared in the original sound. So their mimicry of accent went beyond mere imitation.

Your feedback on this article to the editors
keyboard_arrow_right