Diphthong Placement and Phonetic-Prosodic Salience in Lyrical Hooks: Evidence from Popular Music

Abstract

Research on involuntary musical imagery (“earworms”) has primarily emphasized melodic and rhythmic features, with comparatively little attention to segmental phonetics. This study investigates the role of vowel quality in shaping perceptual salience in lyrical hooks, focusing on the distribution of diphthongs relative to prosodic and metrical prominence. A purposive corpus of eight songs by the Beatles, Queen, Michael Jackson, Pink, and Avicii was analyzed using phonetic transcription, prosodic annotation, and statistical chi-square testing. Results indicate that diphthongs occur disproportionately in prosodically strong positions, suggesting a structured alignment between vowel dynamics and metrical prominence. A phonetic-prosodic salience alignment model is proposed, in which diphthongs function as perceptual peaks while monophthongs provide structural stability. The findings extend existing models of musical salience by incorporating segmental phonetics and suggest directions for future research in music cognition and auditory memory. The study is exploratory and intended to motivate larger-scale phonetic analyses of musical salience.