Aesthetic appeal of prosodic patterns correlates with their effectiveness for speech segmentation

Could the aesthetic appeal of linguistic features influence their learnability, and in turn their long-term stability during language change? Focusing on prosodic patterns, we investigated the baseline assumption that linguistic features like stress patterns affect aesthetic appeal. Listeners’ ratings of isochronous words and words with initially, medially or finally lengthened or shortened syllables revealed that, indeed, different prosodic patterns differed in their aesthetic appeal in terms of ‘liking’, ‘beauty’ and ‘naturalness’. Furthermore, aesthetic ratings of these prosodic patterns corresponded to their effectiveness for speech segmentation in previous experiments, suggesting a potential connection between aesthetics and language processing. This research opens up new avenues for future research on the role of aesthetic preferences in language acquisition and language change.