The bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems

Abstract

The bouba/kiki effect—the association of the nonce word bouba with a round shape and kiki with a spiky shape—is a type of correspondence between speech sounds and visual properties with potentially deep implications for the evolution of spoken language. However, there is debate over the robustness of the effect across cultures and the influence of orthography. We report an online experiment that tested the bouba/kiki effect across speakers of 25 languages representing nine language families and 10 writing systems. Overall, we found strong evidence for the effect across languages, with bouba eliciting more congruent responses than kiki . Participants who spoke languages with Roman scripts were only marginally more likely to show the effect, and analysis of the orthographic shape of the words in different scripts showed that the effect was no stronger for scripts that use rounder forms for bouba and spikier forms for kiki . These results confirm that the bouba/kiki phenomenon is rooted in crossmodal correspondence between aspects of the voice and visual shape, largely independent of orthography. They provide the strongest demonstration to date that the bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)’.

Evaluating replicability of ten influential research on sensory marketing

“…Our replication attempts successfully replicated two findings (Klink, 2000;Shrum et al, 2012) and partially replicated one of them (Yorkston and Menon, 2004). This is consistent with the argument that sound symbolism is robust and found in diverse cultures (Cwiek et al, 2022). Among sensory marketing research, the reliability of the findings might differ depending on the type of sensory stimuli.…”

A Cross‐Modal and Cross‐lingual Study of Iconicity in Language: Insights From Deep Learning

“…This latter experiment on shape phonosymbolism had a wide impact on experimental psychology and linguistics: Several studies managed to replicate Köhler's results, corroborating the psychological reality of the so‐called “maluma–takete” effect (Köhler, 1947 ; Werner, 1948 , 2011 ) or “bouba‐kiki” effect, referring to the pseudowords employed by Ramachandran & Hubbard ( 2001 ). These research efforts set the stage for a number of experiments that repeatedly reported the same phonovisual correspondences at different developmental stages (Maurer, Pathman, & Mondloch, 2006 ; Ozturk, Krehm, & Vouloumanos, 2013 ; Pejovic & Molnar, 2017 ) and in various linguistic, geographical, and cultural contexts (Bremner et al., 2013 ; Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001 ; Chen, Huang, Woods, & Spence, 2016 ; Shinohara & Kawahara, 2010 ; Ćwiek et al., 2021 ). The results of the studies on shape and magnitude symbolism were complemented by other findings that related to different properties of the visual modality, such as color (Johanssohn, Anikin, & Aseyev, 2020 ) and lightness (Hirata, Ukita, & Kita, 2011 ), to their respective phonetic signs.…”

Resolving the bouba-kiki effect enigma by rooting iconic sound symbolism in physical properties of round and spiky objects

“…In other words, the sound of round is spectrally low and temporally smooth . Surprisingly, while these simple acoustic properties have recently been mentioned for possibly being at the origin of the bouba-kiki effect 12 , they have never been tested.…”

“…The second issue deals with the underlying mechanisms that could explain such audiovisual associations and whether the bouba-kiki effect is innate or can be learned through exposure to audiovisual regularities in the environment. In spite of being very robust in adults and shared by most language and cultures 11 , 12 , a meta-analysis 18 showed that infants in their first year were only sensitive to a bouba effect (i.e. a tendency to associate bouba sounds with round shapes).…”