Words That Don’t Sound Nice Are Harder to Remember, Study Says

Swear words are loaded with those satisfying crunchy consonants like Ks and Ts and Gs that add a harsh, stabbing sound to words whose definitions are jagged to begin with. And yet, for as much as those words seem scientifically optimized and specifically engineered to stick and pierce and linger, new research from the University of Vienna suggests that those same sounds might actually be making those words less memorable.

Polishing their findings in PLOS One, researchers Theresa Matzinger and David Košić built twelve nonsense words using English sound rules: some were soft and silky like “clisious” and “sleemious.” Others were designed to be the verbal version of a medieval mace — spiky bludgeoning nonsense words like “gruhious” and “twuhious.”

The researchers then gathered together a hundred native English speakers and tasked them with trying to memorize these words. Participants remembered 53 percent of the soft-sounding words and only 36 percent of the harsh ones. Even when the words had zero meaning and weren’t actually profane, our brains welcomed the gentle kind ones with open arms while rejecting the harsh ones, no matter how sticky they’re designed to be.

Why were harsh sounds harder to remember? No idea. But the researchers have some theories. Maybe those harsh-sounding, popping consonants we call plosives trigger negative associations that our brains have been trained to push out as hard as they can in an act of self-preservation? Or, maybe memory is just weird and doesn’t file things away unless necessary, especially when it’s junkie, jagged, potentially mean words?

Should any research teams figure that out down the line, it could change language as we know it, as we see words that feel good to say when the long-term evolutionary battle and harsh words loaded with means sounding consonants and plosives would slowly drop out of the language.