The effects of linguistic sounds on Westerners' impressions of Japanese pop songs: A comparison between Japanese and English lyrics

This research investigates whether impressions based on song lyrics are affected by linguistic sounds. The stimuli were songs whose melodies are the same but whose lyrics are sung in different languages: Japanese and English. A Japanese syllable is a little different from an English syllable, because it has more vowels and the minimum unit of Japanese is the mora, which basically consists of a consonant followed by a vowel. Twenty Western participants were asked to focus on the sounds of the lyrics and rate how they felt about the songs in terms of each of 25 adjective pairs, using the SD method. The results showed that the ratings differed between the languages. When they listened to the songs in Japanese, they were more likely to describe their response as “stable,” “beautiful,” “impressed,” “easy to visualize,” “healing,” “lyrics match with melodies,” and “like,” rather than when they heard the same songs in English. A factor analysis and statistical tests were conducted on the rating results. It is suggested that the differences between ratings for the Japanese and English songs can be explained by the fact that the Japanese linguistic unit is the mora, which might facilitate making the songs more emotional.