Why we remember 'beautiful' words faster than bland ones

Why do some words feel like velvet while others grate like sandpaper? English speakers often swoon over harmony, lullaby, and melody, yet recoil from drudge, blunt, or moist.

For years, scientists debated whether that pleasure (or discomfort) comes from what a word means, or from its raw sound.

A new study led by linguist Theresa Matzinger at the University of Vienna takes a clean shot at that puzzle by stripping words of meaning altogether.

The verdict is that the phonemic makeup of a word – its consonants, vowels, and their arrangement – can shape how beautiful it sounds and how easily we remember it.

Stripped-down words reveal bias

To uncouple sound from meaning, Matzinger’s team invented pseudowords – think clisious, smanious, drikious – and tuned them to sound “appealing,” “neutral,” or “unappealing,” based on long-standing hunches in phonetics.

The researchers asked 100 native English speakers to learn, recall, and rate these form-only “words.” By design, there were no semantic associations to lean on – no images of melodies or damp basements, just syllables in the air.

When the experts compared memory performance with beauty ratings, a striking pattern jumped out.

“The words that participants remembered best were also the ones they rated as most beautiful – but these were not always the words that we, as researchers, had originally designed to be the most beautiful,” said Matzinger.

That twist suggests earlier studies – relying on real words – may have been biased by meaning, with semantics overshadowing how we remember the sheer euphony (or cacophony) of the sounds themselves.

Words your brain remembers

So why would beauty and memory travel together? One obvious possibility is cognitive fluency: strings that fit the sound patterns of your native language feel smoother to process and therefore more pleasant and more memorable.

“Whether we remember things better because we find them beautiful, or find them beautiful because we can remember them more easily, remains an open question,” said Matzinger.

The team also notes a parallel to music: familiar melodic contours are often judged more pleasing and are easier to recall.

Language may work similarly, with certain syllable shapes, consonant clusters, or stress patterns resonating because we’ve heard them before.

Sound shaping language evolution

Beyond settling an academic debate, the findings have practical bite. If sound alone can nudge memorability, instructors and learners might exploit phonetic “friendliness” when teaching vocabulary in a new language.

A good start would be with forms that fit the learner’s phonotactic comfort zone before moving to tougher clusters.

Marketers, too, have long intuited the power of euphony. This study offers empirical backing for why certain product names stick and feel “right” on first hearing.

Matzinger also gestures at the evolutionary arc of language itself. “Certain sound patterns may persist in languages because they sound pleasant, while others may disappear because we find them less appealing,” she said.

Over generations, preferences for particular syllables or rhythms could influence which coinages spread and which fall flat – one more force, alongside contact and social prestige, shaping how languages slowly change their tune.

Testing memory before beauty

The workflow was simple but revealing. Participants first learned the pseudowords, then attempted to recall them, and only afterward rated their beauty. That order matters.

Because the experiment tested memory before participants rated beauty, the results suggest a tight link between how easily we encode a form and how it feels aesthetically.

But cause and effect aren’t sorted yet. Ongoing work will need to test whether boosting perceived beauty directly improves memory, or whether it is the other way around.

What makes words memorable

Taken together, the study reframes earlier claims about beautiful words. Stripping away meaning lets the soundscape step forward, and certain phoneme combinations simply land better.

That doesn’t mean semantics don’t matter (they do, massively), but it does mean that euphony has its own measurable footprint.

The team’s use of meaning-free stimuli gives future research a clean platform to probe specific questions. Does vowel openness matter more than consonant voicing? Are certain stress patterns universally preferred? Do different languages reward different sound templates?

Untangling beauty and memory

The researchers are careful not to overclaim. Cultural exposure, genre conventions, and individual differences all color what we call “beautiful.”

Frequency effects matter, too: a pseudoword that happens to echo many real words may piggyback on that familiarity.

As Matzinger cautions, “whether we remember things better because we find them beautiful or find them beautiful because we can remember them better remains to be seen.”

Untangling those threads will require more experiments that manipulate perceived beauty independently of learnability, and vice versa.

By swapping meaning for pure sound, this study shows that euphony isn’t just in our heads – it’s in the phonemes. A word’s sonic shape can make it feel more beautiful and lodge it more firmly in memory.

For teachers, copywriters, and anyone coining names, that’s a practical takeaway. For linguists, it’s a fresh map of the terrain where acoustics, cognition, and aesthetics meet and a reminder that the music of language can move us even before we know what any of it means.

The study is published in the journal PLOS ONE.

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