The long E sound feels happy to humans while the UH sound is instinctively sad.
April 20, 2026
Original Paper
U.S. English-speaking children and adults exhibit a “Gleam-Glum” sound symbolic effect linking phonemic vowel sounds with emotional valence
PsyArXiv · mzbr3_v1
The Takeaway
Linguistic theory usually claims that the sounds of words have no natural connection to their meanings. The Gleam-Glum effect shows that people associate specific vowel sounds with emotional states from a very young age. Meaningless nonsense words containing the i sound are consistently rated as bright and positive by both children and adults. Words featuring the sound in glum are perceived as heavy and negative regardless of their actual definitions. This suggests that certain emotions are hard-coded into the physical acoustics of human speech.
From the abstract
We tested a recently found sound symbolic effect, the gleam-glum effect, in which words with the [i]-phoneme (like “gleam”) are perceived as emotionally more positive than matched words with the [Ʌ]-phoneme (like “glum”). We extend prior work and verify this effect using a novel online pseudoword-to-scene matching task, testing U.S. English-speaking adults (n = 105) and 5- to 7-year-old children (n = 52). Participants heard pairs of matched [i]- versus [Ʌ]-monosyllabic pseudowords (e.g., “zeem”