DOES THIS NAME MAKE ME SOUND FAT?

Why Ice Cream and Crackers Have Different Names?

So far, we’ve seen a lot hidden in the language of food. The Chinese history of ketchup and the Muslim histories of sherbet, macaroons, and escabeche tell us about the crucial role of the East in the creation of the West. The way we use words like heirloom, a la, delicious, or exotic on menus tells us about how we think about social class and about the nature of food advertising. But although we’ve talked about food words in terms of their history and the adjectives we use to describe them, I’ve said nothing so far about the sound of the food words themselves.

Why would the sound of a food word tell us anything? It’s not obvious why the sounds in the name of a word might be suggestive of, say, the taste or smell of the food. Shakespeare expressed this skepticism most beautifully in Romeo and Juliet:

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

Juliet is expressing the theory we call conventionalism: that a name for something is just an agreed upon convention. English uses the word egg, but Cantonese calls it daan, and Italian uovo, but if accidentally it had evolved the other way around, it would be fine as long as everyone agreed. The alternative view, that there is something about a name that fits the object naturally, that some names might naturally “sound more sweet” than others, is called naturalism.

Conventionalism is the norm in modern linguistics, because we have found that the sounds that make up a word don’t generally tell you what the word means. Linguists phrase this by saying that the relation between sound and meaning is “arbitrary,” a word first used by political philosopher John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke pointed out that if there were a necessary relationship between sound and meaning, all languages would have the same words for everything, and the word for egg in English and Italian would be the same as the Chinese word.

A moment’s thought suggests another reason that conventionalism makes more sense than naturalism, at least for spoken (as opposed to signed) languages: spoken languages only have around 50 or so distinct “phones” (the distinct sounds that make up the sound structure of a language) and obviously have a lot more ideas to express than 50.

But 2500 years ago in the Cratylus, Plato points out that there are reasonable arguments for naturalism as well as conventionalism. Socrates first agrees with Cratylus’s position that there is an “inherently correct” name for everything for “both Greeks and barbarians.” One way to be natural or “inherently correct” is to use letters consistent with the meaning of the word. For example the letter o (omicron) is round, and “therefore there is plenty of omicron mixed up in the word goggulon (round).” Similarly, words with the sound (Greek rho, ρ, which was pronounced as a rolling trilled  like modern Spanish) often mean something related to motion (rhein [flow], rhoe [current], tromos [trembling]).

But then Socrates turns right around and argues for the conventionalist position of Hermogenes by noting, for example, that even in different dialects of Greek words are pronounced differently, suggesting that convention is needed after all.

Linguistics as a discipline followed this latter line of reasoning, and Ferdinand de Saussure, the Geneva professor who is one of the fathers of modern linguistics, made the principle of the “arbitrariness of the sign” a foundation of our field. But research in the last few decades, following the earlier lead of giants of linguistics from the past century like Otto Jespersen and Roman Jakobson, has shown us that there was something to naturalism after all: sometimes the sounds of a name are in fact associated with the tastes of food.

We call the phenomenon of sounds carrying meaning sound symbolism. Sound symbolism has ramifications beyond its deep philosophical and linguistic interest. Like other linguistic cues to marketing strategies sounds are crucial to food marketing and branding.

Sound symbolism has been most deeply studied with vowels, and in particular the difference between two classes of vowels, front vowels and back vowels, which are named depending on the position of the tongue when articulating the vowels.

The vowels i (the vowel in the words cheese or teeny) and I (pronounced as in mint or thin) are front vowels. Front vowels, roughly speaking, are made by holding the tongue high up in the front part of the mouth. The figure below left shows a very schematic cutaway of the head, with the lips and teeth on the left, and the tongue high up toward the front of the mouth.

By contrast, the vowel α (as in large, pod, or on) is a low back vowel; this sound is made by holding the tongue lower in the back part of the mouth; other back vowels are ο (as in bold) and  (as in the word coarse or my mother’s New York pronunciation of caught). The figure at right on the preceding page shows a very schematic tongue position for these vowels; lower in general, and more toward the back of the throat.

A number of studies over the last 100 years or so have shown that front vowels in many languages tend to be used in words that refer to small, thin, light things, and back vowels in words that refer to big, fat, heavy things. It’s not always true—there are certainly exceptions—but it’s a tendency that you can see in any of the stressed vowels in words like little, teeny, or itsy-bitsy (all front vowels) versus humongous or enormous (back vowels). Or the i vowel in Spanish chico (front vowel, meaning “small”) versus the  in gordo (back vowel, meaning “fat”). Or French petit (front vowel) versus grand (back vowel).

In one marketing study, for example, Richard Klink created pairs of made-up product brand names that were identical except for having front vowels (detal) or back vowels (dutal) and asked participants to answer:

Which brand of laptop seems bigger, Detal or Dutal?
Which brand of vacuum cleaner seems heavier, Keffi or Kuffi?
Which brand of ketchup seems thicker, Nellen or Nullen?
Which brand of beer seems darker, Esab or Usab?

In each case, the product named with back vowels (Dutal, Nullen) was chosen as the larger, heavier, thicker product.

Since ice cream is a product whose whole purpose is to be rich, creamy, and heavy, it is not surprising that people seem to prefer ice creams that are named with back vowels. Eric Yorkston and Geeta Menon at New York University asked participants to read a press release describing a new ice cream about to be released. For half, the ice cream was called “Frish” (front vowel) while for the other half it was called “Frosh” (back vowel). Asked their opinions, the “Frosh” people rated this hypothetical ice cream as smoother, creamier, and richer than other participants rated “Frish,” and were more likely to say they would buy it.

In a final twist, Yorkston and Menon distracted some participants by having them perform another task simultaneously, so they couldn’t fully concentrate on reading about the ice cream. The distracted participants were even more influenced by the vowels, suggesting that the response to the vowels was automatic, at a subconscious level.

I wondered whether commercial ice creams make use of this subconscious association of ice cream names with back vowels as richer and creamier. To find out, I ran what University of Pennsylvania linguist Mark Liberman calls a Breakfast Experiment. Liberman—a tenacious advocate for bringing linguistics to bear on public affairs—often runs a quick experiment on a linguistic tip in the news before breakfast, posting the results on Language Log, the “blog of record” in linguistics. He is legendary for his ability to run complex linguistic statistical analyses in minutes, which he says comes from his days as a piano tuner.

My hypothesis was that we would see more back vowels in names of ice cream brands or flavors, and conversely that thin, light foods like crackers would have more front vowels.

Front versus back vowels in cracker names and ice cream flavors (normalized by dividing by the expected count of front and back vowels computed from a large dictionary of English)

I tested the hypothesis on two lists of food names from the web, the 81 ice cream flavors sold by either Haagen Dazs or Ben & Jerry’s, and a list of 592 cracker brands from a dieting website. For each list, I counted the total number of front vowels (i, I, , e, æ) and the total number of back vowels.

The result? As shown in the chart on the preceding page, I found more back vowels in ice cream names like Rocky Road, Jamoca Almond Fudge, Chocolate, Caramel, Cookie Dough, Coconut and front vowels in cracker names (note the extraordinary number of I vowels) like Cheese Nips, Cheez It, Wheat Thins, Pretzel Thins, Ritz, Krispy, Triscuit, Thin Crisps, Cheese Crisps, Chicken in a Biskit, Snack Sticks, Ritz bits.

Of course there are exceptions: vanilla (the orange blossom of our day), has an I. But most of the front vowels in ice cream flavors tend to be the names of small, thin ingredients in the ice cream (thin mint, chip, peanut brittle).

Sound symbolism is thus an important device in the toolbox of modern advertisers and designers of brand names, and in fact branding companies often get their insights from linguists.

While our ice cream and cracker connections might be subconscious, they are systematic, and linguists have theories about the underlying cause: about why front vowels are associated with small, thin, light things, and back vowels with big, solid, heavy things.

The most widely accepted theory, the frequency code, suggests that low frequencies (sounds with low pitch) and high frequencies (sounds with high pitch) are associated with particular meanings. The frequency code was developed by linguist John Ohala (my phonetics professor as an undergraduate at Berkeley) by extending work by Eugene Morton of the Smithsonian.

Morton noticed that mammals and birds tend to use low-frequency (deeper) sounds when they are aggressive or hostile, but use higher-frequency (higher-pitched) sounds when frightened, appeasing, or friendly. Because larger animals naturally make deeper sounds (the roar of lions) and smaller animals naturally make high-pitched sounds (the tweet of birds), Morton’s idea is that animals try to appear larger when they are competing or aggressive, but smaller and less threatening otherwise.

Morton and Ohala thus suggest that humans instinctively associate the pitch of sounds with size. All vowels are composed of different frequency resonances. When the tongue is high and in the front of the mouth, it creates a small cavity in front. Small cavities cause higher-pitched resonances (the smaller the space for vibration, the shorter the wavelength, hence the higher the frequency). One particular resonance (called the second formant) is much higher for front vowels and lower for back vowels.

Thus the frequency code suggests that front vowels like I and i are associated with small, thin, things, and back vowels like a and ο with big heavy things because front vowels have higher-pitched resonances, and we instinctively associate higher pitch with smaller animals, and by extension smaller things in general.

Researchers have extended this idea to show that raising pitch or “fronting” vowels (moving the tongue a bit toward the front of mouth to make all vowels have a slightly higher second formant pitch) are both especially associated with babies or children. In an early paper I examined more than 60 languages around the world and proposed that the word endings used in many languages to indicate smallness or lightness come historically from a word originally meaning “child” or associated with names of children, like the y in pet names Barbie and Robby. My linguistics colleague Penny Eckert shows that front vowels are associated with positive affect, and that preadolescent girls sometimes use vowel fronting to subtly imbue their speech with sweetness or childhood innocence. Linguist Katherine Rose Geenberg found that speakers of American English move their vowels toward the front when using baby talk, and psychologist Anne Fernald shows that, across languages, talk to babies tends to have high pitch.

The frequency code isn’t the only kind of sound symbolism in food. To see why, we’ll need a brief digression. Consider these two pictures:

Suppose I told you that in the Martian language one of these two was called bouba and the other was called kiki and you had to guess which was which. Think for a second. Which picture is bouba? Which kiki? How about maluma versus takete?

If you’re like most people, you called the jagged picture on the left kiki (or takete) and the round one on the right bouba (or maluma). This test was invented by German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, in 1929. Linguists and psychologists have repeated this experiment using all sorts of made-up words with sounds like bouba and kiki, and no matter what language they study, from Swedish to Swahili to a remote nomadic population of northern Namibia, and even in toddlers two and a half years old, the results are astonishingly consistent. There seems to be something about jagged shapes that makes people call them kiki and rounder curvy shapes that is somehow naturally bouba.

The link to food comes from the lab of Oxford psychologist Charles Spence, one of the world’s foremost researchers in sensory perception. In a number of recent papers, Spence and his colleagues have studied the link between the taste of different foods, the curved and jagged pictures, and words like maluma/takete.

In one paper, for example, Spence, Mary Kim Ngo, and Reeva Misra asked people to eat a piece of chocolate and say whether the taste better matched the words maluma or takete. People eating milk chocolate (Lindt extra creamy 30 percent cocoa) said the taste fit the word maluma (and also matched the curvier figure). People eating dark chocolate (Lindt 70 percent and 90 percent cocoa) instead chose the word takete (and matched the jagged figure). In another paper they found similar results for carbonation; carbonated water was perceived as more “kiki” (and spiky) and still water was perceived as more “bouba” (and curvy). In other words, words with m and l sounds like maluma were associated with creamier or gentler tastes and words with t and k sounds like takete were associated with bitter or carbonated tastes.

These associations are very similar to what I also found with consonants in ice cream and cracker names. I found that l and m occurred more often in ice cream names, while t and d occurred more often in cracker names.

So what is it about bouba and maluma that people associate with visual images of round and curvy, or tastes of creamy and smooth, while kiki and takete are associated with jagged visual images and sharp, bitter, and sour tastes? Recent work by a number of linguists studied exactly which sounds seem to be causing the effects.

One reasonable proposal for what’s going on has to do with continuity and smoothness. Sounds like m, l, and r, called continuants because they are continuous and smooth acoustically (the sound is pretty consistent across its whole length), are more closely associated with smoother figures. By contrast, strident sounds that abruptly start and stop, like t and k, are associated with the spiky figures. The consonant t has the most distinct jagged burst of energy of any consonant in English.

To help you visualize this, look at the display on the following page of the sound waves from a recording that I made of myself saying “maluma” followed by “takete.” Note the relatively smooth wave for maluma, which has a relatively smooth flow of air. By contrast, the three sharp discontinuities in takete on the right occurred when I said the sounds t and k; for each of these consonants, the airflow is briefly blocked by the tongue in the mouth, and then a little burst of air explodes out.

What I call the synesthetic hypothesis suggests that the perception of acoustic smoothness by one of our five senses, hearing, is somehow linked to the perception of smoothness by two other senses: vision (seeing a curvy figure instead of a jagged one) and taste (tasting a creamy instead of sharp taste).

Synesthesia is the general name for the phenomenon of strong associations between the different senses. Some people, like Dan Slobin, a Berkeley professor of psychology and linguistics, are very strong synesthetes. For Slobin, each musical key is associated with a color: C major is pink, C minor is dark red tinged with black. But the bouba/kiki results suggest that, to at least some extent, we are all a little bit synesthetic. Something about our senses of taste/smell, vision, and hearing are linked at least enough so that what is smooth in one is associated with being smooth in another, so that we feel the similarity between sharpness detected by smell (as in cheddar), sharpness detected by touch or vision (like acute angles), and sharpness detected by hearing (abrupt changes in sound).

We can see this link between the senses even in our daily vocabulary. The words sharp and pungent both originally meant something tactile and visual: something that feels pointy or subtends a small visual angle, but both words can be applied to tastes and smells as well.

It’s not clear to what extent these synesthetic links are innate or genetic, and to what extent they are cultural. For example, nomadic tribes in Namibia do associate takete with spiky pictures, but, unlike speakers of many other languages, they don’t associate either the word or the pictures with the bitterness of dark chocolate or with carbonation. This suggests that the fact that we perceive bitter chocolate as “sharper” than milk chocolate or carbonated water as “sharper” than flat water is a metaphor that we learn culturally to associate with these foods. But we really don’t know yet, because we are just at the beginning of understanding these aspects of perception.

There are, however, some evolutionary implications of the synesthetic smoothness hypothesis and of the frequency code.

John Ohala suggests that the link of high pitch with deference or friendliness may explain the origin of the smile, which is similarly associated with appeasing or friendly behavior. The way we make a smile is by retracting the corners of the mouth. Animals like monkeys also retract the corners of their mouths to express submission, and use the opposite facial expression (Ohala calls it the “o-face”), in which the corners of the mouth are drawn forward with the lips possibly protruding, to indicate aggression.

Retracting the corners of the mouth shrinks the size of the front cavity in the mouth, just like the vowels I or i. In fact, the similarity in mouth position between smiling and the vowel i explains why we say “cheese” when we take pictures; i is the smiling vowel.

Ohala’s theory is thus that smiling was originally an appeasement gesture, meaning something like “don’t hurt little old me.” It evolved when mammals were in competitive situations as a way to make the voice sound more high pitched and the smiler appear smaller and less aggressive, and hence friendlier.

Both the frequency code and the synesthetic smoothness hypothesis may also be related to the origin of language. If some kinds of meaning are iconically related to sounds in the way that these hypotheses suggest, it might have been a way for speakers to get across concepts to hearers early on in the evolution of language. The origins of language remain a deep mystery. We do, however, have some hypotheses, like the “bow-wow” theory of language evolution, the idea that language emerged at least partly by copying nature, naming dogs after their bark and cats after their meow and so on. The frequency code suggests that perhaps one of the earliest words created by some cavewoman had high pitched  sounds that meant “baby,” or low pitched α sounds that meant “big,” or perhaps was an acoustically abrupt kikiki meaning “sharp.” Such iconic concepts are only a small part of the vast number of things we talk about using language, but iconicity still may help us understand some of these crucial early bootstrappings of human language.

Whatever their early origins, vowels and consonants have become part of a rich and beautiful system for expressing complex meanings by combining sounds into words, just as smiling has evolved into a means of expressing many shades of happiness, love, and much else. Whatever hidden meanings words and smiles may have, in the end there is always ice cream, as a much later bard, Wallace Stevens, told us:

Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

By Dan Jurafsky in "The Language of Food - A Linguist Reads The Menu", W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2014. Digitalized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.