Non-arbitrary attachment of sounds to object shapes
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 wordsbouba/ˈbuːbə/ and kiki/ˈkiːkiː/, 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,[1] 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.[1] It has also been shown to occur with familiar names. The effect was investigated using fMRI in 2018.[2] The bouba/kiki effect is one form of sound symbolism.[3]
^ abĆwiek, 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 (2022). "The bouba/Kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 377 (1841). doi:10.1098/rstb.2020.0390. PMC8591387. PMID34775818.