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Reposted by Shiri Lev-Ari

Cognition @cognitionjournal.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

1/10 A new paper by shirilevari.bsky.social shows that sound symbolism highlights the properties that distinguish referents from their competitors: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... A🧵

sciencedirect.com

Sound symbolism highlights relative distinctiveness: Evidence from English vocabulary

There is robust evidence that people associate certain sounds with meanings, yet the prevalence and importance of sound symbolism in natural language …

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Shiri Lev-Ari @shirilevari.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

If you don't want to read my full paper (How can you not want to read a paper called "Sorries seem to have the harder words"!?), here's my summary of it: How to make your apology more effective – new research theconversation.com/how-to-make-...

theconversation.com

How to make your apology more effective – new research

Sorry really can be the hardest word.

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Shiri Lev-Ari @shirilevari.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Apologies with long words were perceived as more apologetic than those with shorter words that were matched for frequency. In contrast, word frequency did not influence how apologetic the sentence seemed.

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Shiri Lev-Ari @shirilevari.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

But is this strategy effective? To test that, participants were presented with triads of apologies that had the same meaning but differed in word length or word frequency. The triad sentences appeared in random order and participants ranked them from most to least apologetic.

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Shiri Lev-Ari @shirilevari.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Apology tweets of 25 celebrities and 25 non-celebrities were compared to other tweets by the same users. Apology tweets had longer words! In contrast, they didn’t have more infrequent words.

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Shiri Lev-Ari @shirilevari.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Longer words and infrequent words are harder to produce, so these might be good candidates for apologies. But infrequent words are also harder to understand, so they will burden the addressee. A sophisticated apologizer might then use longer words but not infrequent words.

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Shiri Lev-Ari @shirilevari.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

They make the apology costly by investing time, money, or effort (e.g., traveling specifically to apologize to a friend vs apologizing to them the next time you happen to meet them). What about making the apology itself more costly by producing words that are harder to produce?

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Shiri Lev-Ari @shirilevari.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Apologies are cheap – anyone can apologize regardless of whether they’re sorry. So how do apologizers convince the recipients that they are sincere?

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Shiri Lev-Ari @shirilevari.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

Poll: What proportion of the time does requiring authors to write ‘anonymous’ whenever they cite their papers leads reviewers to know who the authors are vs hides their identity? a) All the time b) 99% of the time c) <50% of the time bc it’s hard to get reviewers from the field

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