Effective communication lies at the heart of human connection. It helps us collaborate with each other, solve problems and build relationships. And communicating clearly is a major consideration for most of us in most aspects of life.

But what if the way some words sound makes them more impactful in communication?

New research I coauthored, published in Cognition, suggests this might be the case. And it could help us all understand how to communicate better with each other.

Psycholinguistics is the study of the use and acquisition of language. A key concept in the field is known as “surprisal”. Surprisal is a measure of how expected something – for example, a word in a sentence or a sound in a word – is relative to what typically happens in the language.

All English words are built from the same vowels and consonants and follow the same rules of combination. But despite this, not all words are created equal. Words made up of unusual sequences of vowels and consonants sound more surprising to listeners. That makes them stand out in speech and affects how we process them.

We use information theory to calculate how surprising a word is. Information theory works by calculating how much information each speech sound contributes to an individual word.

Speech sounds that occur in highly predictable environments contribute relatively little information. These include sequences like /st/ as in “stick” and “stone”, and /an/ as in “can” and........

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