On the revealing the emotional valence in communication by text

Abstract

The interaction between humans and between humans and machines is often based on texts. The statistical analysis, presented here, provides one more reason to suppose that meaningful language communication integrates an emotional component involved at the phonemic level. The performed analysis is of written English language, presented by means words’ phonetic transcripts. The phonemic content of the texts is thought in layers, supposing that the phonological forms involved in the communication have the role of phonological markers assisting emotion transfer. The words are considered as composed of biphones – phonemic pairs consisting of one vowel and one consonant, in either order. Phonemic metadata for this sublexical representation was obtained from a vast corpus of emotionally evaluated texts and submitted to statistical analysis. The result of the applied principle component regression showed that the phonemic content is very strongly related (r = 0.96) with the ratings of emotional valence (positive-negative emotion), provided by readers. The analysis showed the big importance of the first biphone in the words, in alliance with results for single phonemes reported in recent studies. The result shows that the phonemic content presented as a stream of biphones is strongly related to the emotional impact that a text has on the reader. This leads to suppose that the mechanisms that have shaped the phonological forms to communicate conceptual meaning involve emotional valence too.