Louder vowels won’t get you laid, and other tales of spurious correlation | Ars Technica

Louder vowels won't get you laid, and other tales of spurious correlation | Ars Technica

 

Looking at cross-cultural patterns without accounting for this kind of shared history can lead to all kinds of surprising and wild findings—like more traffic accidents in countries with higher linguistic diversity or less smoking among speakers of languages that don't have a separate future tense. Roberts and a colleague foundthat there was a "strong relationship between the amount of chocolate consumed in a country and how many serial killers [it] produced." This sort of finding happens just because cultures often inherit things from their ancestors together: the foods they eat, the clothes they wear, and their political tendencies.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/06/louder-vowels-wont-get-you-laid-and-other-tales-of-spurious-correlation/

Previous cross‐cultural research by Robert Munroe and colleagues has linked two features of language to warm climates—a higher proportion of consonant‐vowel syllables and a higher proportion of sonorous (more audible) sounds. The underlying theory is that people in warmer climates communicate at a distance more often than people in colder climates, and it is adaptive to use syllables and sounds that are more easily heard and recognized at a distance. However, there is considerable variability in warm as opposed to cold climates, which needs to be explained. In the present research report, we show that additional factors increase the predictability of sonority. We find that more specific features of the environment—such as type of plant cover and degree of mountainous terrain—help to predict sonority. And, consistent with previous research on folk‐song style, measures of sexual restrictiveness also predict low sonority.