On the crucial role of “Arousal” and “Saliency” in affective iconicity: Comment on “Methodological Issues in the Study of Phonetic Symbolism” by Tsur and Gafni

Tsur and Gafni (T&G) claim that individual sounds can suggest “elementary percepts,” which, depending on the context, can evoke “specific emotions.” However, their proposal suffers from a lack of a theoretical framework and embedding of the theory in the broader scholarly literature. In terms of existing emotion theories and in line with the results of our previous neurocognitive studies on the topic, the proposed differentiation between these two levels of processing can be best represented by two affective dimensions of arousal and valence, respectively. In addition, our statistical measure for assessing the basic affective tone of texts suggests that the use of mere or rational frequencies of occurrence of all phonemes in a poem – instead of a focus on foregrounded and salient phonemes – may be a further reason for discrepancies of results of previous studies.