ITHEA^® International Journal

"Information Theories and Applications"

2021, Volune 28, Nimber 3

Abstract:

The study aims at exploring the relatedness between the emotional valence (positive-negative emotion) conveyed by conventional texts and their phonemic content. In the proposed approach, the content of a text is considered as composed of layers, assuming that the sub-lexical phonological elements involved contribute to the transmission of an emotional tone. The sub-lexical layer investigated here is composed of “biphones” - pairings of a vowel and a consonant in either order. A previous analysis of metadata derived from a corpus of sentences evaluated for emotion found that the frequencies of the biphones are strongly correlated with emotional valence. The same method of representing the sub-lexical layer was applied to real-world texts. The validity of the relationships derived from the corpus was tested on arbitrarily downloaded texts on diverse topics published by several news agencies. The statistical analysis shows that the derived relationship between emotional valence and the sub-lexical content of biphones is present in structured real-world, ordinary texts. In conclusion: language communication incorporates phonemic patterns that indicate emotional valence. The overall body of a text carries sub-lexical information about its emotional tone. This approach and result are useful for the fields of sentiment analysis and text emotion recognition. The overall result raises the hypothesis that the cognitive mechanisms that shape the phonemic forms used to mentally build a structured language expression reflect emotional valence. The phenomenon needs further investigation whether it depends on the native language of the reader and how, or if at all biphones per se inspire positive or negative emotion in the listener.

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