Stumbled on this:
In psychology and psychiatry, clanging or clang association refers to a mode of speech and logical association to two or more words primarily based upon word sounds when no logical association between the words exists. For example, rhyming or alliteration may lead to the appearance of logical connections where none in fact exists. This, just one manifestation amongst a more general spectrum of thought disorders, is associated with the irregular thinking apparent in psychotic mental illnesses (e.g. schizophrenia).
In sympathetic-magical thinking, we create associations between phenomena based on similarities in pattern, e.g., sticking needles into a voodoo doll is believed to cause needle-like pains in the person whom the doll resembles. Or plants which look like a particular body part (e.g., the lungs) are taken as having a medical influence over that body part. (Cf. the “law of similars” in homeopathy.)
This is obviously the same thing, just based on the sound of words, rather than on visual patterns (or natural sounds). That is, a “thought disorder” which arises from hypersensitive pattern-finding, on the same neurological basis as all of our other pattern-recognition.
The same thing could/should happen with natural sounds, of course. That is, if meditation or drug-induced tinnitus causes you to hear a sound like an ocean’s roar, it would only be “sensible” to see a logical/mystical connection between that inner sound, and the real ocean.