Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study addresses the hypothesis that the aesthetic appeal of linguistic features may influence their learnability and in turn their stability in a language. Focusing on prosodic patterns, we investigated the crucial baseline assumption that linguistic features like stress affect aesthetic appeal. Listeners’ liking, beauty and naturalness ratings of isochronous words and words with initially, medially or finally lengthened or shortened syllables revealed that, indeed, these patterns differed in their aesthetic appeal. Interestingly, the aesthetic appeal of prosodic patterns corresponded to their effectiveness for speech segmentation in other experiments, indicating a potential connection between aesthetics and language learning and opening up avenues for further research on the role of aesthetics in language acquisition and change.