09-09-2017, 04:48 PM
In the broadest sense of the word, a vocable is any significant sound expressed by people, such as a word or a term, which is fixed by its language and culture. However, the use in the broad sense is archaic. Such non-lexical words are often used in music, such as la la or dum dee dum, or in magical incantations, such as abra-cadabra. Many Native American songs consist entirely of words; this may be due to both the phonetic substitution to increase the resonance of the song, and the exchange of songs between nations that speak different languages.
Vocables are common as fill pauses, such as um and er in English, where they have little formal meaning and rarely have purpose. Pseudopalabras imitating the structure of real words are used in experiments in psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, for example the nonsense syllables introduced by Hermann Ebbinghaus. Babies' proto-words, which are meaningful but do not correspond to the words of adult speech, are also sometimes called words.
Vocables are common as fill pauses, such as um and er in English, where they have little formal meaning and rarely have purpose. Pseudopalabras imitating the structure of real words are used in experiments in psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, for example the nonsense syllables introduced by Hermann Ebbinghaus. Babies' proto-words, which are meaningful but do not correspond to the words of adult speech, are also sometimes called words.