I literally begin to feel the words in a different way than I did before, and there's no doubt in my mind that what I feel actually is there. What I see runs counter in a big way to what most linguists assume about word meaning. Each consonant and vowel in a language has a meaning, in the sense that every word containing that sound has an element of meaning which words not containing that sound do not have. Consequently all stopped sounds involve a barrier of some kind. This meaning is different from the referent , which is what we normally think of as the meaning of a word.
Reference is a separate process from sound-meaning, and is layered on top of it.
Reference is less central to word semantics than sound-meaning, although it is much more obvious to the casual observer. This aspect of meaning which is determined by sound lies much closer to what we call the connotation than the denotation. Sound meaning does tend to predispose referents, but does not largely determine them. Sound affects meaning in every word in every language. However, because of the way reference interacts with sound-meaning, its effect is not as obvious at first glance in concrete nouns and other words with very inflexible referents.