Human exclamations of pain are similar across the world, new study reveals

Our results suggest pain interjections tin so beryllium traced backmost to nonlinguistic vocalisations, but the communicative is little wide for joyousness and disgust.

What are interjections?

Interjections are standalone words that tin beryllium utilized connected their ain (like “ouch!” oregon “wow!”). They don’t harvester grammatically with different words.

Because linguists mostly survey grammatical combinations, for a agelong clip they didn’t wage overmuch attraction to interjections. This is wherefore immoderate precise basal questions astir them person yet to beryllium answered – contempt interjections being precise predominant successful code and cardinal to communication.

Pain, disgust and joy

The main extremity of our probe was to find retired whether interjections stock akin vowels crossed languages based connected the emotion oregon impact they’re meant to express.

If so, we wanted to cognize whether these commonalities tin beryllium explained by the acoustic forms of nonlinguistic vocalisations similar cries and moans.

To trial this, we collected pain, disgust and joyousness interjections from dictionaries spanning galore languages successful Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe (more than 500 interjections successful 131 languages).

To comparison our interjections with noninterjection words, we utilized ample databases with broad lists of words for languages successful our sample. This allowed america to tally statistical tests to comparison the organisation of vowels successful interjections to those recovered successful different words.

These tests showed that connected average, the symptom interjections we collected person much “a” vowels, and much successions of vowels, similar “ai” (as successful “ay!” successful Spanish) oregon “au” (as successful “ouch!” successful English). This applies crossed each the regions of the satellite we investigated.

To beryllium clear, this effect doesn’t mean each symptom interjections volition incorporate an “a”, “ai” oregon “au” sound. But if you prime a random symptom interjection, it has much chances to person these sounds than if you prime a random disgust oregon joyousness interjection, oregon immoderate different word.

Of the 3 types of affective experiences we looked at, symptom was the lone 1 with specified properties. Vowels successful disgust and joyousness interjections, by contrast, did not disagree markedly from different words.

This shows the vowels successful symptom interjections are not random. So, wherever bash they travel from?

Pain interjections lucifer symptom vocalisations To research this question, we looked astatine the nonlinguistic sounds radical marque to explicit pain, arsenic good arsenic disgust and joy.

We recorded a ample fig of English, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish and Turkish speakers producing vocal sounds – without accepted words – to explicit these affective experiences. We past counted the vowels successful these vocalisations.

We recovered each affectional experience has its ain vowel illustration for vocalisations: symptom has much “a” vowels, disgust much central, “neutral” vowels (like the 2nd vowel successful “dragon”), and joyousness has much “i” vowels.

In different words, some interjections and nonlinguistic vocalisations for symptom person much “a” vowels than expected. However, disgust and joyousness interjections don’t stock the aforesaid vowels arsenic the vocalisations expressing those emotions.

What does it archer us?

Our survey shows that portion interjections are accepted and language-specific, their vowels are not afloat random. Pain interjections person markedly much “a”, “ai” oregon “au” than expected. And with respect to “a”, they lucifer nonlinguistic vocalisations.

Joy interjections, by contrast, did not disagree markedly from different words (Source: Pixabay)

This suggests that pain interjections could deduce from the nonlinguistic sounds radical nutrient erstwhile successful pain, but this doesn’t look to beryllium the lawsuit for disgust and joy.

These results shed airy connected large questions astir the origins of linguistic forms. We often deliberation of words arsenic arbitrary combinations of sounds. The information radical accidental “house” successful English, but “casa” successful Spanish, is often considered purely conventional.

But immoderate aspects of connection whitethorn beryllium little arbitrary than others.

Pain – a cardinal facet of quality acquisition – is associated with beardown physiological and affectional responses, to the constituent that these spontaneous reactions could signifier the accepted words humans usage to explicit pain.

Much remains to beryllium understood. In this study, we focused connected vowels. But this raises the question: what astir consonants (“p”, “t”, “s”, etc.)“? And what astir emotions different than pain, disgust and joy? Such investigations volition shed further airy connected however embodied quality connection is, and however it developed primitively successful our ancestors.