Acoustic Surprisal and Word Vividness Enhance Memory Recognition, Challenging Linguistic Theory

New psycholinguistic research, slated for publication in the journal Cognition in 2025, establishes a quantifiable relationship between a word's acoustic structure and its memorability, offering a fresh perspective for optimizing communication. The study centers on "surprisal," an information-theoretic measure that quantifies how unexpected a word or sound is relative to established linguistic patterns.

Researchers quantified this metric by analyzing a corpus of 51 million words derived from American English movie and television subtitles. This analysis assigned an information contribution value to each speech sound, revealing a significant interaction: words categorized as highly vivid—those that are concrete and specific—consistently exhibited high surprisal scores. This dual characteristic was empirically shown to substantially improve subsequent memory recognition when compared to abstract terms.

For instance, concrete lexical items such as "dog" and "flower" demonstrated both greater vividness and higher acoustic surprisal when contrasted with abstract concepts like "stun" or "plot." This finding directly challenges the long-held linguistic doctrine, often associated with Ferdinand de Saussure, which asserts that the link between a word's sound and its concept is fundamentally arbitrary and conventional. The current evidence suggests that the inherent sounds of words subtly guide cognitive attention, implying the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign may not be absolute.

The underlying mechanism proposes that speakers may unconsciously favor word forms with higher inherent surprisal to effectively capture attention and solidify critical concepts in long-term memory. This suggests a functional design in language that extends beyond mere convention, potentially reflecting an optimization for information transfer, a concept well-modeled by information theory. The cognitive effort required to process a word correlates with its surprisal, calculated as the negative logarithm of its conditional probability given the preceding context.

This newly quantified link between sound structure and retention carries practical value across professional fields, particularly in advertising and educational pedagogy for 2025 and beyond. By strategically employing words with high surprisal values, communicators may maximize both the immediate impact and the long-term retention of their intended messages. Furthermore, previous research has indicated that word surprisal is a reliable predictor of neural activity and behavioral processing difficulty, evidenced in studies tracking reading times and EEG responses across multiple languages.