P Is for Happiness, N Is for Sadness: Universals in Sound Iconicity to Detect Emotions in Poetry

What is it about?

The study tested the relation between the occurrence of certain phonemes (plosives vs. continuants) and the assessment of a text as either 'happy' or 'sad'. Results suggest a universal (i.e., language independent) relation between sound-characteristics of a text and its emotional tone.

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Why is it important?

The results of the research suggest that phonetic characteristics of texts - independent of their language - might provide an easy-to-process method for sentiment-analysis.