[owyn]

The word "challenge" in the article title is clickbait. I guess the assumption challenged is that this measurable effect is for humans only because we are so special? Good as a headline for a non-science audience that mostly doesn't believe in evolution. It's pretty obvious that our auditory and visual systems are older than humanity as a species. I'd be surprised if the results were anything but confirming. Chickens are not going to learn English. Other species use sound to communicate and that this effect is measurable is pretty cool.

[suddenlybananas]

But no serious linguist thinks that kiki-bouba is that important to language. It's a theory that mistakenly thinks that hard problem in language is coming up with words for objects instead of the actually hard problem of combining words in a systematic way.

[lillesvin]

> But no serious linguist thinks that kiki-bouba is that important to language.

Do you have a source on that? Because I would expect anyone studying sound symbolism to find the bouba-kiki effect extremely important which is probably why it's such a widely cited study, also inside linguistics.

[streetfighter64]

> a non-science audience that mostly doesn't believe in evolution

This isn't true anywhere in the world except Turkey. Even the second least "evolution believing" country in the world, USA, has 54% of the general public accepting evolution and only 31% believing in creationism, as of 2009.

[wongarsu]

The mainline opposing view to evolution seems to be that one guy made all living beings over the course of a week. Common brain structures should be even less surprising in that scenario. That'd just be God taking what works and reusing it, either refining it for a more intelligent species or removing parts that are not needed but leaving some of the supporting infrastructure around

After all, lazy engineers are made in God's image /s