Fifteen years ago I went to a museum exhibit on Reggio Emilia teaching methods that I still think about once a week or so. (Reggio Emilia is similar to Montessori in that it is child-led exploration but different in that encourages multiple cross-modal forms of expression to aid comprehension.)
The Reggio Emilia exhibit featured children performing a cross-modal exercise of drawing the sounds of various types of shoes walking down stairs to illustrate the "Hundred Languages of Children" concept. It showed how kids translate auditory experiences into visual ones - high heels would been drawn with spikey patterns and construction boots would be big wavey ones. This is reminiscent of the Bouba-Kiki effect. But other smaller nuances such as duration translating to span and loudness to magnitude.
I took away a fascinating insight from childhood cognition: children effortlessly bridge sensory modalities, an ability that often diminishes in adults to the point that asking an adult to “draw this sound” or “build something that feels like this smell” is met with a blank look but which a child is often completely game to try. Tasking an adult with a cross-modal assignment literally does not compute.
This cross-modal perception revealed that children possess a remarkable synesthetic intuition, using diverse forms of expression to understand and interpret the world—an ability I had completely forgotten as an adult, which hindered my communication with young children in early education environments.
It highlighted the importance of nurturing cross modal communication styles and once one notices it (like in say Mr. Rogers opening ritual to use multiple queues to engage children’s parasympathetic nervous system) one unlocks a whole new vocabulary with not just children but adults. It’s been a powerful tool in my creative toolbox since.
I wonder if the ability diminishes in adults, or if adults are more inhibited and worried about looking foolish. Try the same experiment with adults after drinking alcohol!
you know, i think this skill can be learned. i used to definitely have very little ability to "bridge sensory modalities", but i've been studying music and performance as a hobby somewhat seriously for about 6 years now. and i now feel like i have much more of that ability than i did before. i probably had it as a kid, just as you were saying, but i am definitely well into adulthood now :)
(there is a radio program i listen to where the guy talks about the music he plays and the context and he explains many things in this sort of "bridging sensory modalities" sort of way. and i used to always think, "that is just some straight up nonsense that he is saying." but now, i often see what he is saying very literally...)
Huh, that is pretty cool. I mean I wouldn't have any problem with trying to do that "Draw a sound", "What colour is the concept of the wind" etc. Maybe I'm just odd but it is something I just never really lost with time, I suppose.
What about the effect where for some pairs of words that don't theoretically have ordering preference (kiki/bouba vs bouba/kiki), (plus/minus vs minus/plus), (on/off vs off/on), (positive/negative vs negative/positive) have some psychological order that most people use and if the other ordering is used, it sound weird?
Even among words that do theoretically have an ordering preference, some people have different habits. I knew someone who habitually said "three or two", rather than "two or three".
Leaving aside the effect of prosody mentioned in another comment, I think the rest of it is habit, together with the brain's tendency to group things. If you're used to hearing "plus or minus", your brain may be grouping it together into a phrase whose meaning you understand directly without decomposition, so if you hear "minus or plus" there's a moment of having to map the components to the composite meaning, together with wondering if the speaker intends the difference to have a meaning.
(In mathematics, there's a reason to have both ± and ∓, since you can use them both in the same equation when you need "minus when the other one is plus, and plus when the other one is minus". For instance, a±b∓c means "a+b-c or a-b+c".)
I don't know if this has a name, but if it does I'd love to know it.
In (US?) English if you were to describe some thing and you had many adjectives for its size, color, origin, age, a visual pattern like "polka dot" or striped, and so on - many native speakers (at least in my region) would intuitively assemble that clause in the same order as each other without really being able to clearly articulate why. There are some supposed grammar rules that inform it but in my circles people just explain it as basically due to vibes. It was definitely not anything I remember from my public school education growing up.
If I'm describing a large, heavy, square, shiny, metal, block - that's the order that feels right for me. If I try shifting any pair of those around it just feels weird and the farther apart they appear in my original ordering, the weirder the swap would feel for me. "square metal heavy shiny large block" has awful 'mouthfeel', as it were. It's also a bit jarring to hear aloud.
Yes. As per etymologynerd, English speakers tend to like trochaic stress rhythm in sentences, like "salt and pepper" or "lee and sophie" where a different ordering sounds weird.
That seem completely unrelated/off-topic. Those are patterns that people hear and repeat.
The article’s effect describes something that is apparently not just shared information, that is deeper.
I have always thought this association is partly from some intuition we have about the mechanical and acoustic properties of hypothetical things that would have this shape.
The shape with sharp, jagged edges would occur in real life if it were made of some hard material, perhaps, like glass, metal, etc. The shape with the soft, curvy lines would occur if it were made of something softer and possibly elastic.
It doesn't take much intuition to guess that the sharper shape will produce a sound closer to "ki," with sharp transients and lots of high frequencies - like a piece of glass or metal falling - and the rounded one perhaps closer to "bou," with softer transients and perhaps a time-varying resonant frequency as the shape is malleable (think of the sound of a drop of water landing).
The effect is somehow also visible in the shapes of the letters, with ‘B’, ‘O’ ‘U’ being rounded and soft. The letters ‘K’ and ‘I’ are made of sharper shapes featuring triangles and lines. I wonder if letter designs were influenced by the sounds made by objects.
Mama/dada effect: Children everywhere in the world say mamamama as their first syllable, which is why mama means mother both in Chinese and in anglo-franco-hispanic-germanic-latin languages, and everywhere else. They then say dada, baba, papa, which is why baba means dad in both China and in latin languages.
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. - Nonsense, mama is an easier syllable for mouths to make, that's the sound that cats make as well as cows.
While "mama" is a very common word for "mother" across languages, it is by no means universal. A particularly startling example is Georgian, where "mama" means dad, and "deda" means mom (and note that this is an Indo-European language!).
Which is to say - there's no single "first syllable" and "second syllable" that all babies say in that exact order. They just babble, and adults interpret those noises as syllables according to the phonemics of their language. Thus results may vary.
The Occam's razor explanation for the worldwide distribution of mama / dada is very, very straightforward: (a) they are the easiest syllables, and therefore some of the first and most common syllables children babble, (b) parents are extremely willing to read meaning into the sounds their children make (what parent doesn't think their kid is a little genius?), and (c) parents are eeeever so slightly self-interested in what that meaning should be.
The whole effect is probably based on the combined word-sound associations everyone acquires, not on some biological preference. For starters, there's no evolutionary reason why sounds should be associated with shapes.
The cards in the game have nonsense words and illustrations. Players work through various scenarios where they try to agree about which nonsense words should go with which illustrations.
this implies that humans have an intuitive sense of the shape of the waveform, which I think would be surprising!! And also empirically testable
(not saying you're wrong, but it's not necessarily obvious to me as true. The sound is a vibration/signal, how our brains interpret it may have no correlation to its "shape". Do we have an intuition for "spiky" electromagnetic signals? maybe we do, that's why looking at nature, smooth curves and such, is empirically more relaxing for people than artificial environments..?)
I think it's the shapes made by your mouth and tongue to make the sounds. Rounded to make b and ou and a, and sharp corners and tongue-palate gap to make k and i. The Wikipedia article mentions a little about this.
I think it's just that bouba has o, and kiki has k. Also the b is half-round, and I is more spiky. Visual differences, not auditory.
edit: You make a round shape with your mouth in o
As an art teacher I use this effect to demonstrate how meaning in an image can be inate, as opposed to socially constructed. To demonstrate social construction I use an image of an arrow. To an Australian aborigini an arrow 'points' in the 'wrong' direction as it's directionality is derived from its semblance to a birds footprint.
One of the best TED talks ever given, by VS Ramachandran - a video describing some of the fundamental mechanisms of the brain. This video was the first time I heard Bouba and Kiki, but there's so much more going on in this talk. It's wonderful.
Interesting. I was given a similar "test" in high school, although the names given were Kepick and Oona. But the same preference was there: "kepick" with its "sharp" sounds favored the angled drawing, "Oona" the more undulating. There were some other questions as well, such as a hypothetical about which shape was male and which female (strong preference in the class towards "Oona" being female).
So I have to ponder how bouba/kiki diverged into kepick/oona. Kinda wonder if some random schoolteacher remembered the study but didn't remember the exact names, substituted something similar, and then built it into a curriculum that got picked up by the education system.
When I hear or say K, T, or Ch, I hear a higher pitch frequency being used than B, M, L (which sounds like lower frequencies).
Humans have a psychoacoustic effect that makes higher pitch sounds perceived as being louder.
When somethting has a louder intial sound, but the transient sound is about the same, it makes it feel more snappy (like a snare, versus a kick). This is reminiscent of a jagged edge.
I wonder if this effect can be explained by the we form the "bouba"/"kiki" sounds when we speak them. "Kiki" has a sharper enunciation when using your tongue and mouth to form it, while "bouba" feels more like an open round one.
These have entered our common household vocabulary after I called one of our houseplants "a little too kiki for my liking" and was forced to explain. Humans love categories, it's great to have names for splits like this :)
I have likened this effect to “what sounds right.”
I am curious about something with German, and would love feedback from native German speakers: “gendering” on German words seems to be largely arbitrary (as opposed to the romantic languages where gendering seems to align with how the culture associates the word to a gender). My suspicion, that has “felt” correct in most cases, is that gendering in German words is largely an artifact of which article sounds the most correct with the word. Sort of how we might use “a/an” with words that have consonant or vowel starting sounds in English.
It's funny to me that my gut reaction was, "Oh. Why do they want that? Bouba would be such a weird tattoo compared to kiki."
I don't have tattoos. I don't really want them (I appreciate the artistry of them, but I can't stand seeing things on my skin). I don't know why I should care, never mind care the opposite way of most people.
Why has nobody mentioned Chomsky in this thread? The correspondence in the results between American English and Tamil just seems like something that should shout Chomsky. I know little about it, but some form of universality in language, and how humans see the shape of it, seems apt as a starting point.
Also Corman Mccarthy. His books carefully balance the 'sound' of the prose to help the reader imagine the story. That's why his writing has a poetic tone that drives some people crazy.
I used to experience this had a kid! Not only did words and some names have shapes, but they were quite often coloured shapes. I have quite strong memories of some of the associations I made between names and shapes. However, I have completely lost the 'ability' as an adult. I do not feel it at all.
Welp. Got it wrong. I thought of a Hawaiian flower when I heard Kiki and chose the flower looking one. I can also associate bouba to mean bulbous and choose the rounder one. My brain pattern matches like crazy.
[+] [-] paulgerhardt|1 year ago|reply
The Reggio Emilia exhibit featured children performing a cross-modal exercise of drawing the sounds of various types of shoes walking down stairs to illustrate the "Hundred Languages of Children" concept. It showed how kids translate auditory experiences into visual ones - high heels would been drawn with spikey patterns and construction boots would be big wavey ones. This is reminiscent of the Bouba-Kiki effect. But other smaller nuances such as duration translating to span and loudness to magnitude.
I took away a fascinating insight from childhood cognition: children effortlessly bridge sensory modalities, an ability that often diminishes in adults to the point that asking an adult to “draw this sound” or “build something that feels like this smell” is met with a blank look but which a child is often completely game to try. Tasking an adult with a cross-modal assignment literally does not compute.
This cross-modal perception revealed that children possess a remarkable synesthetic intuition, using diverse forms of expression to understand and interpret the world—an ability I had completely forgotten as an adult, which hindered my communication with young children in early education environments.
It highlighted the importance of nurturing cross modal communication styles and once one notices it (like in say Mr. Rogers opening ritual to use multiple queues to engage children’s parasympathetic nervous system) one unlocks a whole new vocabulary with not just children but adults. It’s been a powerful tool in my creative toolbox since.
[+] [-] spencerchubb|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] avg_dev|1 year ago|reply
(there is a radio program i listen to where the guy talks about the music he plays and the context and he explains many things in this sort of "bridging sensory modalities" sort of way. and i used to always think, "that is just some straight up nonsense that he is saying." but now, i often see what he is saying very literally...)
[+] [-] anal_reactor|1 year ago|reply
The more I learn about children the more it seems like childhood is basically 20-year-long acid trip with a bit of amphetamine here and there.
[+] [-] DaoVeles|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jesprenj|1 year ago|reply
Does this effect have a name?
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|1 year ago|reply
Leaving aside the effect of prosody mentioned in another comment, I think the rest of it is habit, together with the brain's tendency to group things. If you're used to hearing "plus or minus", your brain may be grouping it together into a phrase whose meaning you understand directly without decomposition, so if you hear "minus or plus" there's a moment of having to map the components to the composite meaning, together with wondering if the speaker intends the difference to have a meaning.
(In mathematics, there's a reason to have both ± and ∓, since you can use them both in the same equation when you need "minus when the other one is plus, and plus when the other one is minus". For instance, a±b∓c means "a+b-c or a-b+c".)
I don't know if this has a name, but if it does I'd love to know it.
[+] [-] mtndew4brkfst|1 year ago|reply
If I'm describing a large, heavy, square, shiny, metal, block - that's the order that feels right for me. If I try shifting any pair of those around it just feels weird and the farther apart they appear in my original ordering, the weirder the swap would feel for me. "square metal heavy shiny large block" has awful 'mouthfeel', as it were. It's also a bit jarring to hear aloud.
[+] [-] viraptor|1 year ago|reply
Edit, found it another way: "Irreversible binomial" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_binomial
[+] [-] incognito124|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] foreigner|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] adzm|1 year ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branching_(linguistics)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-directionality_parameter
[+] [-] JyB|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tantalor|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ComplexSystems|1 year ago|reply
The shape with sharp, jagged edges would occur in real life if it were made of some hard material, perhaps, like glass, metal, etc. The shape with the soft, curvy lines would occur if it were made of something softer and possibly elastic.
It doesn't take much intuition to guess that the sharper shape will produce a sound closer to "ki," with sharp transients and lots of high frequencies - like a piece of glass or metal falling - and the rounded one perhaps closer to "bou," with softer transients and perhaps a time-varying resonant frequency as the shape is malleable (think of the sound of a drop of water landing).
[+] [-] madebythejus|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] caf|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] JyB|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] acyou|1 year ago|reply
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. - Nonsense, mama is an easier syllable for mouths to make, that's the sound that cats make as well as cows.
[+] [-] int_19h|1 year ago|reply
Which is to say - there's no single "first syllable" and "second syllable" that all babies say in that exact order. They just babble, and adults interpret those noises as syllables according to the phonemics of their language. Thus results may vary.
[+] [-] troad|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tgv|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] acyou|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mdiep|1 year ago|reply
- BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/408945/boubakiki
- Kickstarter (Funded): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/grandgamersguild/bouba-...
The cards in the game have nonsense words and illustrations. Players work through various scenarios where they try to agree about which nonsense words should go with which illustrations.
[+] [-] moritzwarhier|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] OmarShehata|1 year ago|reply
(not saying you're wrong, but it's not necessarily obvious to me as true. The sound is a vibration/signal, how our brains interpret it may have no correlation to its "shape". Do we have an intuition for "spiky" electromagnetic signals? maybe we do, that's why looking at nature, smooth curves and such, is empirically more relaxing for people than artificial environments..?)
[+] [-] mkl|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] viraptor|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] amatic|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] thih9|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|1 year ago|reply
Bouba/Kiki Effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27885703 - July 2021 (94 comments)
Bouba/kiki effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8372550 - Sept 2014 (1 comment)
(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)
[+] [-] userbinator|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Daub|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] radiojosh|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] otho|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|1 year ago|reply
I don't think I'm alone in this: I googled Kepick and Oona and found a reference from a 2012 blogpost: https://nwccapstone.blogspot.com/2012/02/meet-oona-and-kepic...
So I have to ponder how bouba/kiki diverged into kepick/oona. Kinda wonder if some random schoolteacher remembered the study but didn't remember the exact names, substituted something similar, and then built it into a curriculum that got picked up by the education system.
[+] [-] userbinator|1 year ago|reply
"Kepick" sounds like a lockpicking tool, which also tends to be sharp and pointy.
[+] [-] de_nied|1 year ago|reply
Humans have a psychoacoustic effect that makes higher pitch sounds perceived as being louder.
When somethting has a louder intial sound, but the transient sound is about the same, it makes it feel more snappy (like a snare, versus a kick). This is reminiscent of a jagged edge.
[+] [-] dyslexit|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Yenrabbit|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dclowd9901|1 year ago|reply
I am curious about something with German, and would love feedback from native German speakers: “gendering” on German words seems to be largely arbitrary (as opposed to the romantic languages where gendering seems to align with how the culture associates the word to a gender). My suspicion, that has “felt” correct in most cases, is that gendering in German words is largely an artifact of which article sounds the most correct with the word. Sort of how we might use “a/an” with words that have consonant or vowel starting sounds in English.
Is there any truth to this supposition?
[+] [-] why_at|1 year ago|reply
Strangely, everyone I've asked says they would want to be Bouba. No one wants to be Kiki.
[+] [-] smeej|1 year ago|reply
I don't have tattoos. I don't really want them (I appreciate the artistry of them, but I can't stand seeing things on my skin). I don't know why I should care, never mind care the opposite way of most people.
[+] [-] nyanpasu64|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bee_rider|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kayo_20211030|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] chinchilla2020|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Harmohit|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sizzle|1 year ago|reply