Differences in arousal and valence on the Korean phoneme of artificial voice between Korean and Chinese women

by Kwang Jin Lee, Gi-Eun Lee, San Ho Lee, Jang-Han Lee

Although active research is in progress in the fields of psychology and linguistics on the emotional characteristics of the symbol and meaning of sound itself, since the systematic emotional model is not applied, each researcher uses a subjective concept and acts as an obstacle to the expansion of research. There is a limitation in that it cannot be confirmed whether the sound symbol has universality regardless of cultural differences between different languages.

In this study, the difference between the arousal and valence of emotions felt toward Hangul phonemes was explored according to consonant and vowel through comparison between Korean and Chinese women. 38 Korean women and 32 Chinese women were recruited, and an online experiment was conducted in which arousal and valence were reported for 42 Hangeul phoneme sound stimuli.

As a result of comparing the arousal and valence of each group, Koreans showed significantly higher arousal scores than Chinese, and these results showed different differences according to consonant and vowel. In valence, there was a difference between nationalities only according to consonant indicating that Koreans showed lower positivity toward aspirated sounds than Chinese. Through these results, it was confirmed that the emotional meaning of the sound symbol between different languages is different, which can be affected by consonant and vowels.

This study identified differences in emotional perception between cultures by using two dimensions of emotions, arousal, and valence, which are systematized for sound symbols, and suggests implications for the relationship between sound symbol and emotions and cultural differences in the future.