GetWiki

{{Short description|Non-arbitrary attachment of sounds to object shapes}}{{pp-move}}thumb|right|250px|alt=A spiky geometric shape (left) and a rounded geometric shape (right)|This picture is used as a test to demonstrate that people may not attach sounds to shapes arbitrarily. When given the names "kiki" and "bouba", many cultural and linguistic communities worldwide robustly tend to label the shape on the left "kiki" and the one on the right "bouba".The bouba/kiki effect, or kiki/bouba effect, is a non-arbitrary mental association between certain speech sounds and certain visual shapes. Most narrowly, it is the tendency for people, when presented with the nonsense words bouba {{IPAc-en|ˈ|b|u:|b|ə}} and kiki {{IPAc-en|ˈ|k|i:|k|i:}}, to associate bouba with a rounded shape and kiki with a spiky shape. Its discovery dates back to the 1920s, when psychologists documented experimental participants as connecting nonsense words to shapes in consistent ways. There is a strong general tendency towards the effect worldwide; it has been robustly confirmed across a majority of cultures and languages in which it has been researched,JOURNAL,weblink 10.1098/rstb.2020.0390, The bouba/Kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems, 2022, Ćwiek, Aleksandra, Fuchs, Susanne, Draxler, Christoph, Asu, Eva Liina, Dediu, Dan, Hiovain, Katri, Kawahara, Shigeto, Koutalidis, Sofia, Krifka, Manfred, Lippus, Pärtel, Lupyan, Gary, Oh, Grace E., Paul, Jing, Petrone, Caterina, Ridouane, Rachid, Reiter, Sabine, Schümchen, Nathalie, Szalontai, Ádám, Ünal-Logacev, Özlem, Zeller, Jochen, Perlman, Marcus, Winter, Bodo, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 377, 1841, 34775818, 8591387, for example including among English-speaking American university students, Tamil speakers in India, speakers of certain languages with no writing system, young children, infants, and (though to a much lesser degree) the congenitally blind. It has also been shown to occur with familiar names. The effect was investigated using fMRI in 2018.JOURNAL, 2019-02-01, The cerebral bases of the bouba-kiki effect, NeuroImage, 186, 679–689, 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.11.033, 1053-8119, Peiffer-Smadja, Nathan, Cohen, Laurent, 30503933, 54164828, free, The bouba/kiki effect is one form of sound symbolism.JOURNAL, Margiotoudi Konstantina and Pulvermüller Friedemann, 2020, Action sound–shape congruencies explain sound symbolism, Scientific Reports, 10, 1, 12706, 10.1038/s41598-020-69528-4, 32728096, 7392762, 2020NatSR..1012706M,weblink {{ProQuest, 2428279185, }}

Research

Discovery

This effect was first observed by Georgian psychologist Dimitri Uznadze in a 1924 paper.WEB,weblink 18 April 2023, bard.edu, Ein experimenteller Beitrag zum Problem der psychologischen Grundlagen der Namengebung, Dimitri Usnadze, de, {{Primary source inline|date=May 2023}} He conducted an experiment with 10 participants who were given a list with nonsense words, shown six drawings for five seconds each, then instructed to pick a name for the drawing from the list of given words. He describes the different "strategies" participants developed to match words to drawings and quotes their reasoning. He also describes situations where participants described very specific forms that they associated with a nonsense word, without reference to the shown drawings. He develops a theory of four factors that influence the way names for objects are decided.In total, there were 42 words. For one particular drawing, 45% picked the same word. For three others, the percentages were 40%. Uznadze points out that this is significantly more overlap than one could expect, given the high number of possible words. He speculates that there must therefore be certain regularities "which the human soul follows in the process of name-giving". German American psychologist Wolfgang Köhler referred to Uznadze's experiment in a 1929 bookBOOK, Köhler, Wolfgang, 1929, Gestalt Psychology.,weblink registration, New York, Liveright, which showed two forms and asked readers which shape was called "takete" and which was called "maluma". Although he does not say so outright, Köhler implies that there is a strong preference to pair the jagged shape with "takete" and the rounded shape with "maluma".BOOK, Köhler, Wolfgang, 1947, Gestalt Psychology,weblink registration, 2nd, New York, Liveright, 133,

Extension to other contexts

In 2001, V. S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard repeated Köhler's experiment using the words "kiki" and "bouba" and asked American college undergraduates and Tamil speakers in India, "Which of these shapes is bouba and which is kiki?" In both groups, 95% to 98% selected the curvy shape as "bouba" and the jagged one as "kiki", suggesting that the human brain somehow attaches abstract meanings to the shapes and sounds consistently.JOURNAL, Ramachandran, V.S., Hubbard, E.M., amp, 2001, Synaesthesia: A window into perception, thought and language, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, 12, 3–34,weblink 2011-10-20, 2011-08-13,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20110813064348weblink">weblink dead, {{failed verification|date=August 2020|talk=Ramachandran and Hubbard 2001}}Daphne Maurer and colleagues showed that even children as young as 2{{1/2}} years old may show this preference.JOURNAL, Maurer, Daphne, Pathman, Thanujeni, Mondloch, Catherine J., amp, 2006, The shape of boubas: Sound-shape correspondences in toddlers and adults, Developmental Science, 9, 3, 316–322, 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2006.00495.x, 16669803, 7297731,weblink dead,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20110723035944weblink">weblink 2011-07-23, 2011-06-19, More recent work by Ozge Ozturk and colleagues in 2013 showed that even 4-month-old infants have the same sound–shape mapping biases as adults and toddlers.JOURNAL, Ozturk, Ozge, Krehm, Madelaine, Vouloumanos, Athena, Sound symbolism in infancy: Evidence for sound–shape cross-modal correspondences in 4-month-olds, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2013, 114, 2, 173–186, 10.1016/j.jecp.2012.05.004, 22960203, 7274252,weblink 2019-09-24, 2020-08-17,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20200817164233weblink">weblink dead, Infants are able to differentiate between congruent trials (pairing an angular shape with "kiki" or a curvy shape with "bubu") and incongruent trials (pairing a curvy shape with "kiki" or an angular shape with "bubu"). Infants looked longer at incongruent pairings than at congruent pairings. Infants' mapping was based on the combination of consonants and vowels in the words, and neither consonants nor vowels alone sufficed for mapping. These results suggest that some sound–shape mappings precede language learning, and may in fact aid in language learning by establishing a basis for matching labels to referents and narrowing the hypothesis space for young infants. Adults in this study, like infants, used a combination of consonant and vowel information to match the labels they heard with the shapes they saw. However, this was not the only strategy that was available to them. Adults, unlike infants, were also able to use consonant information alone and vowel information alone to match the labels to the shapes, albeit less frequently than the consonant–vowel combination. When vowels and consonants were put in conflict, adults used consonants more often than vowels.The effect has also been shown to emerge in other contexts, such as when words are paired with evaluative meanings (with "bouba" words associated with positive concepts and "kiki" words associated with negative concepts)CONFERENCE, Bross, Fabian, 2018, The Good, the Bad, the Bouba, and the Kiki. Cross-Modal Correspondences Between Evaluative Meanings, Speech-Sounds, and Object Shapes, 14th conference "Phonetics & Phonology in the German-Speaking World", University of Vienna, 10.13140/RG.2.2.11463.14240, or when the words to be paired are existing first names, suggesting that some familiarity with the linguistic stimuli does not eliminate the effect. A study showed that individuals will pair names such as "Molly" with round silhouettes, and names such as "Kate" with sharp silhouettes. Moreover, individuals will associate different personality traits with either group of names (e.g., easygoingness with "round names"; determination with "sharp names"). This may hint at a role of abstract concepts in the effect.JOURNAL, Sidhu, David M., Pexman, Penny M., 2015-05-27, What's in a Name? Sound Symbolism and Gender in First Names, PLOS ONE, 10, 5, e0126809, 10.1371/journal.pone.0126809, 1932-6203, 4446333, 26016856, 2015PLoSO..1026809S, free,

Contexts where the effect is smaller or absent

Other research suggests that this effect does not occur in all communities,JOURNAL, Rogers, Susan K., Ross, Abraham S., 1975, A cross-cultural test of the maluma–takete phenomenon, Perception, 4, 1, 105–106, 10.1068/p040105, 1161435, 30045028, and it appears that the effect breaks if the sounds do not make licit words in the language.JOURNAL, Styles, Suzy, Gawne, Lauren, 2017, When Does Maluma/Takete Fail? Two Key Failures and a Meta-Analysis Suggest That Phonology and Phonotactics Matter, i-Perception, 8, 4, 204166951772480, 10.1177/2041669517724807, 28890777, 5574486, The bouba/kiki effect seems to be dependent on a long sensitive period, with high visual capacities in childhood being necessary for its typical development. Although the congenitally blind have been reported to show a bouba/kiki effect, they show a much smaller one for touched shapes than sighted individuals do for visual shapes.JOURNAL, Fryer, Louise, Freeman, Jonathan, Pring, Linda, amp, 2014, Touching words is not enough: How visual experience influences haptic–auditory associations in the "Bouba–Kiki" effect., Cognition, 132, 2, 164–173, 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.03.015, 24809744, 29605784,weblink JOURNAL, Hamilton-Fletcher, Giles, Pisanski, Katarzyna, Reby, David, Stefańczyk, Michał, Ward, Jamie, Sorokowska, Agnieszka, amp, 2018, The role of visual experience in the emergence of cross-modal correspondences., Cognition, 175, 114–121, 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.02.023, 29502009, 3688492,weblink

Languages where the effect is smaller or absent

Studies show that speakers of certain languages have notably failed to show the effect, namely including Mandarin Chinese, Turkish, and Romanian.

Neuroscience

In 2019, Nathan Peiffer-Smadja and Laurent Cohen published the first study using fMRI to explore the bouba/kiki effect. They found that prefrontal activation is stronger to mismatching (bouba with spiky shape) than to matching (bouba with round shape) stimuli. A subsequent study by Kelly McCormick and colleagues reported a similar pattern of greater activation for mismatched word-shape stimuli, but with most activity in parietal regions including the intraparietal sulcus and supramarginal gyrus, regions known to play a role in sensory association and perceptual-motor processing.JOURNAL, McCormick, Kelly, Lacey, Simon, Stilla, Randall, Nygaard, Lynne C., Sathian, K., 2021-08-11, Neural Basis of the Sound-Symbolic Crossmodal Correspondence Between Auditory Pseudowords and Visual Shapes,weblink Multisensory Research, -1, aop, 29–78, 10.1163/22134808-bja10060, 34384048, 9196751, 236998825, 2213-4794, Peiffer-Smadja and Cohen also found that sound-shape matching also influences activations in the auditory and visual cortices, suggesting an effect of matching at an early stage in sensory processing.

Implications for understanding language

Ramachandran and Hubbard suggest that the kiki/bouba effect has implications for the evolution of language, because it suggests that the naming of objects is not completely arbitrary.{{rp|17}} The rounded shape may most commonly be named "bouba" because the mouth makes a more rounded shape to produce that sound while a more taut, angular mouth shape is needed to make the sounds in "kiki".JOURNAL, D'Onofrio, Annette, Phonetic Detail and Dimensionality in Sound-shape Correspondences: Refining the Bouba-Kiki Paradigm, Language and Speech, 2013, 57, 3, 367–393, 10.1.1.1020.1352, 10.1177/0023830913507694, 51937587, Alternatively, the distinction may be between coronal or dorsal consonants like /k/ and labial consonants like /b/.CONFERENCE, McCormick, Kelly, Kim, Jee Young, List, Sara, Nygaard, Lynne C., 2015, Sound to Meaning Mappings in the Bouba-Kiki Effect,weblink Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: Mind, Technology, and Society: Pasadena, California, 23–25 July 2015, Austin, TX, Cognitive Science Society, 1565–1570, 978-0-9911967-2-2, 2019-02-08, 2019-02-09,weblink dead, Additionally, it was shown that it is not only different consonants (e.g., voiceless versus voiced) and different vowel qualities (e.g., /a/ versus /i/) that play a role in the effect, but also vowel quantity (long versus short vowels). In one study, participants rated words containing long vowels to refer to longer objects and short vowels to short objects, at least for languages that make a vowel length distinction.CONFERENCE, Bross, Fabian, 2018,weblink Cognitive associations between vowel length and object size: A new feature contributing to a bouba/kiki effect, Belz, M., Mooshammer, C., Fuchs, S., Jannedy, S., Rasskazova, O., Zygis, M., Proceedings of the Conference on Phonetics & Phonology in German-Speaking Countries, 13, Berlin, Humbold University, 17–20, The presence of these "synesthesia-like mappings" suggest that this effect may be the neurological basis for sound symbolism, in which sounds are non-arbitrarily mapped to objects and events in the world.{{citation needed|date=April 2016}} Research has also indicated that the effect may be a case of ideasthesia,JOURNAL, Gómez Milán, E., Iborra, O., de Córdoba, M.J., Juárez-Ramos, V., Rodríguez Artacho, M.A., Rubio, J.L., 2013, The Kiki-Bouba effect: A case of personification and ideaesthesia, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 20, 1–2, 84–102,weblink subscription, a phenomenon in which activations of concepts (inducers) evoke perception-like experiences (concurrents). The name comes from the Greek idea and aisthesis, meaning "sensing concepts" or "sensing ideas", and was introduced by Danko Nikolić.CONFERENCE, Nikolić, Danko, Is synaesthesia actually ideaestesia? An inquiry into the nature of the phenomenon, Proceedings of the Third International Congress on Synaesthesia, Science & Art, 2009,weblink

See also

• Color symbolism
• Japanese sound symbolism
• Origin of language
• Semiotics
• Universal language

References

{{reflist}}