Theresa Matzinger’s ÖAW-funded project “BEALP – Biophysiological Explorations of Aesthetically Appealing Linguistic Patterns” explores whether everyday linguistic features differ in their aesthetic appeal and how this may influence how easily and effectively these features can be learned, memorized and transmitted to future generations of speakers. In the long term, these processes may influence which features remain stable during long-term linguistic change.
At its core, the project addresses a central and largely unexplored question: whether everyday linguistic features, such as speech sounds, their combinations, or speech melodies, differ in their aesthetic appeal at all. Building on this, the project also investigates how listeners from different cultural backgrounds perceive the beauty of different languages, and which factors contribute to these judgments. In doing so, it disentangles the relative contribution of purely linguistic factors, such as speech sounds or melodies, and non-linguistic factors, such as familiarity with a language, language-based biases, and cultural stereotypes.
To capture aesthetic appeal in a systematic and objective way, the project combines study participants’ appeal ratings with biophysiological measures. Specifically, it tests whether changes in pupil size and skin conductance reliably reflect the perceived appeal of linguistic features and languages.
For that, the project makes use of the eye-tracking and skin conductance equipment at the MediaLab to record participants’ physiological responses while they listen to various words and languages.
Theresa Matzinger is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of English and American Studies and an associate of the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub. Her work focuses on the biological and cultural evolution of language(s), language learning, historical language change, and non-human animal communication and cognition. In her research, she combines methods from the fields of psycholinguistics, evolutionary linguistics, historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, behavioral economics, and behavioral biology.
