Consonants are More Important than Vowels in the Bouba-kiki Effect

Abstract

Adult listeners systematically associate certain speech sounds with round or spiky shapes, a sound-symbolic phenomenon known as the "bouba-kiki effect." In this study, we investigate the respective influences of consonants and vowels in this phenomenon. French participants were asked to match auditorily presented pseudowords with one of two visually presented shapes, one round and one spiky. The pseudowords were created by crossing either two consonant pairs with a wide range of vowels (experiment 1 and 2) or two vowel pairs with a wide range of consonants (experiment 3). Analyses showed that consonants have a greater influence than vowels in the bouba-kiki effect. Importantly, this asymmetry cannot be due to an onset bias, as a strong consonantal influence is found both with CVCV (experiment 1) and VCV (experiment 2) stimuli. We discuss these results in terms of the differential role of consonants and vowels in speech perception.

Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages

“…Although most recent research has emphasized the role of consonants in shapesound meaning associations like this (34,35), the usual hypothesis in this direction concerned the correlation between vowel roundedness and round objects (11)-association that appears as a tendency in our analyses without reaching the minimum statistical threshold established before. Both small and round have been linked to the phenomenon of cross-modal mapping (10,13,36).…”

Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association

“…Notice that specific features of the form map on to specific features of the meaning (e.g., the presence of a protrusion at the mouth, the ability of that protrusion to open vertically). Because only certain aspects of meaning are included in the mapping, there are elements of the concept bird that are not represented (e.g., 4 Though note that the shape associations of the voiceless bilabial stop /p/ have been somewhat equivocal (see D'Onofrio, 2013;Fort et al, 2014). 5 Readers familiar with the sound symbolism and iconicity literature will no doubt notice the absence of reference to Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in Linguistics (1916), which famously stated that Bthe bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary^(p. 67).…”

“…One approach would be to examine whether the relevant associations are present universally, and from a very young age. While there is evidence for sensitivity to the mil/mal effect (Peña et al, 2011) and the maluma/takete effect (Ozturk et al, 2013) in four month-old infants, it is notable that two other studies have failed to find evidence of infant sensitivity to the maluma/takete effect at that age (Fort et al, 2014;Pejovic & Molnar, 2016). In addition, one might debate whether observing an effect at four months of age is sufficient to infer its innateness.…”

Developmental change in children’s sensitivity to sound symbolism

“…Novel words were those used in Maurer et al (2006). Novel words included twoor three-syllable words constructed to emphasize the vowel differences between each word pair (e.g., mabuma/tuhkeetee) and included consonant and vowel sounds previously established as sound symbolic for round and pointy (Fort, Martin, & Peperkamp, 2015;Köhler, 1947;Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). Cues to sound symbolic meaning were consistent and robust across the set of novel words such Note.…”