In the broadest sense of the word, a vocable is any meaningful sound uttered by people, such as a word or term, that is fixed by their language and culture. Use of the words in the broad sense is archaic and the term is instead used for utterances which are not considered
word
A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no conse ...
s, such as the English vocables of assent and denial, ''uh-huh'' and ''uh-uh'' , or the vocable of error, ''uh-oh'' .
Such non-lexical vocables are often
used in music, for example ''la la la'' or ''dum dee dum'', or in magical incantations, such as ''abra-cadabra''. Many
Native American songs consist entirely of vocables; this may be due to both phonetic substitution to increase the
resonance
Resonance describes the phenomenon of increased amplitude that occurs when the frequency of an applied periodic force (or a Fourier component of it) is equal or close to a natural frequency of the system on which it acts. When an oscil ...
of the song, and to the trade of songs between nations speaking different languages.
Jewish
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
Nigunim
A nigun ( he, ניגון meaning "tune" or "melody", plural nigunim) or niggun (plural niggunim) is a form of Jewish religious song or tune sung by groups. It is vocal music, often with repetitive sounds such as "Bim-Bim-Bam", "Lai-Lai-Lai", " ...
also feature wordless melodies composed entirely of vocables such as ''Yai nai nai'' or ''Yai dai dai''.
Vocables are common as
pause fillers, such as ''um'' and ''er'' in English, where they have little formal meaning and are rarely purposeful.
Pseudoword
A pseudoword is a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language, while in fact it has no meaning in the lexicon. It is a kind of non-lexical vocable. A pseudoword is a specific type of non-word composed of a combi ...
s that mimic the structure of real words are used in experiments in
psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind ...
and
cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.
Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which ...
, for example the
nonsense syllables introduced by
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Hermann Ebbinghaus (24 January 185026 February 1909) was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory, and is known for his discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing effect. He was also the first person to descri ...
.
The
proto-words of infants, which are meaningful but do not correspond to words of adult speech, are also sometimes called vocables.
[Crystal (2008) ''A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics'']
See also
*
Non-lexical vocables in music
*
Speech disfluency
*
Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as ''oink'', ''m ...
References
Oral communication
Singing
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