This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: In Korean, the term "aegyo" denotes a playful cuteness put on by adults to win someone's affection, typically in romantic contexts. This is usually accomplished with bashful expressions or a childlike manner of speaking sometimes known as "baby talk" in Western cultures.
Aegyo is often associated with K-pop idols, who are sometimes asked to "perform" aegyo by their fans, even competing to see who can be the cutest. In Korean dramas, romantic scenes between young adults sometimes feature aegyo speech, as one character tries to woo another by appearing more endearing to their love interest. In The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, researchers from Duksung Women's University in South Korea and the University of Zurich in Switzerland set out to understand the acoustics behind aegyo speech—and what about it tugs at our heartstrings.
To measure this, the researchers focused on formant 1 (F1) values of vowel sounds. Formants are acoustic features of the voice concentrated around particular frequencies in a speech wave, based on the movement of the tongue, lips and jaw. F1 is inversely related to vowel height and is mostly determined by the length of the throat.
"A shorter vocal tract naturally produces higher resonances, and therefore higher formant frequencies, than a longer one," said author Ji-eun Kim. "This is one of the main reasons why children's voices sound so different from those of adults." By having male and female speakers ages 25 to 31 read sentences with and without aegyo, the researchers discovered that speakers increased their formant frequencies when speaking with aegyo, suggesting they changed their voices to make them sound like they had shorter vocal tracts. "In the animal kingdom, several species lower their larynx to create the impression of a longer vocal tract and, therefore, a larger body size, making themselves appear more formidable than they really are," author Volker Dellwo said.
"Our findings suggest that humans can use the opposite strategy: Rather than sounding larger, speakers of aegyo make themselves sound smaller and younger." These results have already raised further questions for Kim and Dellwo, which they are eager to study. They want to understand how adults make their vocal tracts sound shorter and plan to explore the sociological reasons why aegyo speech is used. It's possible that a smaller, more childlike voice can elicit a protective response from others and strengthen social bonds, but the researchers are also intrigued by another theory: Raising formant frequencies could be a way to make the speaker more memorable.
"If this is the case, sounding cute may not only make someone appear more approachable but could also help establish a person's identity in the minds of others, a process that is fundamental at the beginning of any close social relationship," Dellwo said. Ji-eun Kim et al, Korean aegyo speech shows systematic F1 increase to signal childlike qualities, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (2026). On arXiv: DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2604.25133 Journal information: Journal of the Acoustical Society of America , arXiv Provided by American Institute of Physics Swati Mestri holds a bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering and has worked as a content editor since 2019.
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