This is one of the most famous experiments in linguistics.
One of these shapes is called “bouba”.
The other is called “kiki”. Which is which?
This was invented in 1929, using slightly different words,
and it’s been refined over time.
For most people, the pointy shape is "kiki"
and the rounded shape is "bouba."
The majority of studies…
Wow, that is a lot of citations.
The majority of studies find that pointy shapes are more associated with
unvoiced plosives and front vowels: so “ta, pi, ka”,
and round shapes are associated with
voiced plosives, nasals, and back vowels, so, “bou, gǝ, no”.
Okay, sure, but that’s just English, right?
We have words like ‘point’ and ‘balloon’,
maybe we’re just copying the associations from the words
we already know.
One of the founders of modern linguistics
has an entire theory named after him,
about there being no relation between the
form of a word and what it represents.
But: there’s a study where English speakers
were given pairs of words in a language from Peru.
In each pair,
one word was for a bird, and one was for a fish.
And the English speakers, who didn’t know the language,
who knew nothing even close to the language…
they could sort those words into birds and fish
a little bit better than chance.
Not well, but out of hundreds of people answering thousands of questions,
they got 58% right. That is a statistically significant result.
And there’s another study where Hebrew speakers were given pairs of
Chinese characters with opposite definitions,
and asked to match up the characters and definitions.
Again, slightly better than chance, about 55% right.
And if people who speak different languages have even
a slight ability to figure out completely unfamiliar words,
well, that raises the question,
do humans have some sort of built-in associations
between sounds and symbols and things in the real world?
“Bouba” and “kiki” have been tested in a lot of languages, and, yeah,
there seems to be something there,
what researchers call a type of "crossmodal correspondence" or
"sound symbolism."
Correlations between phonemes, the sounds we make,
and traits like shape, texture, brightness, size, or even taste.
Maybe that’s down to cross-activation between brain regions:
researchers into synaesthesia have spent a long time on that.
Or it could be repeated association.
An elephant makes a deeper sound than a mouse.
A large dog usually barks lower and longer than a small dog.
If you shout into a big, round cave,
it’ll reflect back deep, round, resonating tones.
Shout into a tiny cave with a lot of sharp angles in it
and you’ll hear higher, sharper tones.
Something hard and brittle is more likely to make a sharp ‘kh’ sound,
something like ‘kiki’, when you hit it or break it or shatter it;
something soft and round is more likely to make a noise like “bouba”.
I need to stress this is one theory from a couple of papers,
don’t take this as gospel, it’s right to be skeptical about that.
Plus, it doesn’t always work.
A paper from 1975 shows the results of a
bouba-kiki style test on Songe speakers in Papua New Guinea,
where the results were like they were picking at random. No preference.
And in 2017, another test on Syuba speakers in Nepal, again: no preference.
The likely reason is that the nonsense words they chose
could not exist in those languages.
It’d be like giving English speakers a test to choose between
“ŋoba” and “tlet”.
You can’t start a word with ŋ or tl in English,
so the choice doesn’t make sense.
The frustrating thing is: there isn’t much data on the failures.
Researchers often don’t publish their negative results,
and besides it’s very difficult and very expensive to give linguistic tests
to people who’ve never been exposed to any of the major world languages.
But according to all those studies,
that bouba/kiki distinction is true for most people.
There may be a link between some sounds and some real-world properties.
And that may be why English speakers were able to distinguish
birds and fish in that Peruvian language:
the birds’ names had more high, front, non‐rounded vowels:
/i/ and /e/, they had more “sharp sounds”.
And while there are plenty of exceptions,
birds have more sharp beaks and claws than your average fish does.