Abstract
Eight types of recorded phonetic stimuli were presented to Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking students of Finnish universities. Four of these stimulus types consisted of wholly artificial, partly controlled and partly randomized sequences of Finland-Swedish speech sounds; two were more similar to Finnish and two to Swedish, having been obtained by scrambling either the vowels or the consonants of samples of Finnish and Swedish texts, respectively. It was found that (1) the ratings of Finnish and Finland-Swedish listeners were relatively consistent when the stimuli differed radically from Finnish and Finland-Swedish, but tended to vary more when stimuli were more similar to these two natural languages; and that (2) the consonant/vowel ratio and syllabic structure had a greater influence on aesthetic preference than the front vowel/back vowel ratio.
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