Author: Maïa Ponsonnet, Researcher, Linguistics, The University of Western Australia

We all know what words we might shout out when we stub a toe or touch something hot. For those of us who speak English, it’s probably “ouch”. But what kinds of “pain words” (or “interjections”) do speakers of other languages use to express pain? And do these interjections feature similar sounds across languages, as we might expect if they are reflexive responses? A new article published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America examines this question for the first time. Our study measured vowels (“a”, “i”, “o”, etc.) in interjections expressing pain, disgust and joy in over…