Free The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu by Dan Jurafsky Page B

(the vowel in the words cheese or teeny ) and I (pronounced as in mint or thin ) are front vowels. Front vowels, roughly speaking, are made by holding the tongue high up in the front part of the mouth. The figure below left shows a very schematic cutaway of the head, with the lips and teeth on the left, and the tongue high up toward the front of the mouth.

    By contrast, the vowel α (as in large , pod , or on ) is a low back vowel;this sound is made by holding the tongue lower in the back part of the mouth; other back vowels are ο (as in bol d ) and(as in the word coarse or my mother’s New York pronunciation of caught ). The figure at right on the preceding page shows a very schematic tongue position for these vowels; lower in general, and more toward the back of the throat.
    A number of studies over the last 100 years or so have shown that front vowels in many languages tend to be used in words that refer to small, thin, light things, and back vowels in words that refer to big, fat, heavy things. It’s not always true—there are certainly exceptions—but it’s a tendency that you can see in any of the stressed vowels in words like little , teeny , or itsy-bitsy (all front vowels) versus humongous or enormous (back vowels). Or the i vowel in Spanish chico (front vowel, meaning “small”) versus thein gordo (back vowel, meaning “fat”). Or French petit (front vowel) versus grand (back vowel).
    In one marketing study, for example, Richard Klink created pairs of made-up product brand names that were identical except for having front vowels ( deta l ) or back vowels ( dutal ) and asked participants to answer:
Which brand of laptop seems bigger, Detal or Dutal?
Which brand of vacuum cleaner seems heavier, Keffi or Kuffi?
Which brand of ketchup seems thicker, Nellen or Nullen?
Which brand of beer seems darker, Esab or Usab?
     
    In each case, the product named with back vowels (Dutal, Nullen) was chosen as the larger, heavier, thicker product.
    Since ice cream is a product whose whole purpose is to be rich, creamy, and heavy, it is not surprising that people seem to prefer ice creams that are named with back vowels. Eric Yorkston and Geeta Menon at New York University asked participants to read a press release describing a new ice cream about to be released. For half, the ice creamwas called “Frish” (front vowel) while for the other half it was called “Frosh” (back vowel). Asked their opinions, the “Frosh” people rated this hypothetical ice cream as smoother, creamier, and richer than other participants rated “Frish,” and were more likely to say they would buy it.
    In a final twist, Yorkston and Menon distracted some participants by having them perform another task simultaneously, so they couldn’t fully concentrate on reading about the ice cream. The distracted participants were even more influenced by the vowels, suggesting that the response to the vowels was automatic, at a subconscious level.
    I wondered whether commercial ice creams make use of this subconscious association of ice cream names with back vowels as richer and creamier. To find out, I ran what University of Pennsylvania linguist Mark Liberman calls a Breakfast Experiment. Liberman—a tenacious advocate for bringing linguistics to bear on public affairs—often runs a quick experiment on a linguistic tip in the news before breakfast, posting the results on Language Log , the “blog of record” in linguistics. He is legendary for his ability to run complex linguistic statistical analyses in minutes, which he says comes from his days as a piano tuner.
    My hypothesis was that we would see more back vowels in names ofice cream brands or flavors, and conversely that thin, light foods like crackers would have more front vowels.

Front versus back vowels in cracker names and ice cream flavors (normalized by dividing by the expected count of front and back vowels computed from a large dictionary of English)
     
    I tested the hypothesis on