In speech, a
vocable is an utterance, term, or
wordIn language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
that is capable of being spoken and recognized. A
non-lexical vocable is used without semantic role or
meaningIn linguistics, meaning is what is expressed by the writer or speaker, and what is conveyed to the reader or listener, provided that they talk about the same thing . In other words if the object and the name of the object and the concepts in their head are the same...
, while structure of vocables is often considered apart from any meaning. A vocable consists of one or a sequence of
phonemeIn a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s and may be represented by a string of
lettersA letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....
or other symbols.
Non-lexical vocables are often
used in musicNon-lexical vocables, which may be mixed with meaningful text, are a form of nonsense syllable used in a wide variety of music. A common English example would be "la la la".-Traditional music:...
as artistic content. As a common speech disfluencies in many languages, they have little formal meaning and are rarely purposeful.
They are also used in experiments in
cognitive psychologyCognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....
; examples from this context are the
nonsense syllableIn cognitive psychology, a nonsense syllable is a word-like string of letters that is not intended to have any established meaning; it is a special case of a non-lexical vocable...
s introduced by
Hermann EbbinghausHermann Ebbinghaus 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 describe the learning curve...
, or the use of non-words that mimic the structure of real words in experiments in
psycholinguisticsPsycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
.