Recognizing when an “a” should be a Long A or Short A is much harder.

Long vowel sound A is easy to say, it sounds like the “a” in “game.” If you can say the letter “A”, then you’ve mastered the sound that Long A makes. As a phonetician, here’s my advice: Read the price, silently, before hitting ‘submit’.Long Vowel Sound A: Patterns, Rules, and Audio Long Vowel Sound A: Patterns, Rules, and Audio But the fact that short and long vowels had a connection to the PayPal process? This was news to me. Isn’t it interesting that $7.66 ends with the ‘i’ sound associated with smallness and $7.22 ends with the ‘uw’ sound associated with bigness? We’ve known for sometime that colors, facial expressions, and ‘subliminals’ influence our purchasing decisions. The lower price is the better deal, of course, but…shoppers who were offered the scoop at the higher price of $7.66 were more likely to buy it than those offered the price of $7.22 – but only if they’d been asked to say the price aloud.” Gilbert describes a study where “one group was shown an ad for an ice-cream scoop that was priced at $7.66, while another was shown an ad for a $7.22 scoop.

Gilbert, prices that end with a short vowel will seem less expensive than prices that end with long vowels… even if their numerical value is larger. Here’s how it works in terms of how we choose what to purchase. Short vowels (like the ‘i’ in “thin”) tend to make us think of smallness and words with long vowels (like the ‘uw’ in “hoop”) connect us with a feeling of bigness. Gilbert talked about the link between what linguists call ‘short’ and ‘long’ vowels and how we subconsciously associate words with ‘smallness’ and ‘bigness’.

This phenomenon was described, as an aside, in an Op-Ed article by Daniel Gilbert in the New York Times. But did you know that the way words sound can actually influence our buying decisions? Take, for example, the exclamations “Wow”, “Cool”, and “Yuck”. A word’s meaning is often shaped by the way it sounds.

What is a long vowel sound