Ihre Wahrnehmung der Lautstärke verbiegt sich zu dem, was Sie wissen, laut New Psychology Research | Die Ergebnisse legen nahe, dass die Vertrautheit mit Sprache grundlegende Aspekte der auditorischen Wahrnehmung wie Lautstärke prägen kann.

From the article: A new study [published](https://doi.org/10.5334/joc.445) in the Journal of Cognition provides evidence that what we know influences what we hear. Researchers found that when people listened to pairs of words and nonsense words spoken at the same volume, they tended to judge the real words as louder. This perceptual bias appeared not only in a person’s native language but also in their second language, although with some differences in strength. The findings suggest that familiarity with language can shape basic aspects of auditory perception, such as loudness.

The researchers were interested in whether a previously documented visual illusion—where familiar letters and words are perceived as physically larger than unfamiliar combinations—also occurs with sound. In other words, could the brain treat known words as perceptually “louder” in the same way it treats them as visually “taller,” even when there is no physical difference?

This question connects to larger theories in cognitive science about how perception is influenced by prior knowledge. In particular, models of language processing suggest that top-down processes, like recognizing a word, can shape the way basic sensory features are experienced. The team wanted to know whether this effect could cross sensory boundaries, extending from vision into hearing.

They also wanted to test whether this effect depends on how familiar someone is with the language. For example, would a person hear a native-language word as louder than a foreign one? And would the effect be weaker when listening to a second language, where vocabulary is less deeply ingrained?

“We were inspired by earlier findings of the word/letter height superiority illusion in vision (New et al., 2016), where letters and words are perceived as taller than pseudoletters or pseudowords (letter strings that follow the orthographic and phonotactic rules of a language but have no meaning, e.g., wug) of the same size,” said study author Boris New, a professor in cognitive psychology at the Université Savoie Mont Blanc, LPNC.

“We wanted to know whether this illusion was specific to reading (and perhaps to the visual word form area) or whether it reflected a more general cognitive mechanism that could also be observed in other modalities like audition. The study connects also to an everyday phenomenon – many people feel they need to ‘turn up the volume’ when watching movies in a foreign language. We wanted to test whether this subjective experience has a perceptual basis: do words in a familiar language actually feel louder than in a less familiar one, even when their physical intensity is identical?”