Bouba/kiki effect

A spiky geometric shape (left) and a rounded geometric shape (right) — This picture is used as a test to demonstrate that people may not attach sounds to shapes arbitrarily. When given the names "kiki" and "bouba", many cultural and linguistic communities worldwide robustly tend to label the shape on the left "kiki" and the one on the right "bouba".

The bouba/kiki effect, or kiki/bouba effect, is a non-arbitrary mental association between certain speech sounds and certain visual shapes. Most narrowly, it is the tendency for people, when presented with the nonsense words bouba /ˈbuːbə/ and kiki /ˈkiːkiː/, to associate bouba with a rounded shape and kiki with a spiky shape. Its discovery dates back to the 1920s, when psychologists documented experimental participants as connecting nonsense words to shapes in consistent ways. There is a strong general tendency towards the effect worldwide; it has been robustly confirmed across a majority of cultures and languages in which it has been researched,^[1] for example including among English-speaking American university students, Tamil speakers in India, speakers of certain languages with no writing system, young children, infants, and (though to a much lesser degree) the congenitally blind.^[1] It has also been shown to occur with familiar names. The effect was investigated using fMRI in 2018.^[2] The bouba/kiki effect is one form of sound symbolism.^[3]

^ ^a ^b Ćwiek, Aleksandra; Fuchs, Susanne; Draxler, Christoph; Asu, Eva Liina; Dediu, Dan; Hiovain, Katri; Kawahara, Shigeto; Koutalidis, Sofia; Krifka, Manfred; Lippus, Pärtel; Lupyan, Gary; Oh, Grace E.; Paul, Jing; Petrone, Caterina; Ridouane, Rachid; Reiter, Sabine; Schümchen, Nathalie; Szalontai, Ádám; Ünal-Logacev, Özlem; Zeller, Jochen; Perlman, Marcus; Winter, Bodo (2022). "The bouba/Kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 377 (1841). doi:10.1098/rstb.2020.0390. PMC 8591387. PMID 34775818.
^ Peiffer-Smadja, Nathan; Cohen, Laurent (2019-02-01). "The cerebral bases of the bouba-kiki effect". NeuroImage. 186: 679–689. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.11.033. ISSN 1053-8119. PMID 30503933. S2CID 54164828.
^ Margiotoudi Konstantina and Pulvermüller Friedemann (2020). "Action sound–shape congruencies explain sound symbolism". Scientific Reports. 10 (1): 12706. Bibcode:2020NatSR..1012706M. doi:10.1038/s41598-020-69528-4. PMC 7392762. PMID 32728096. ProQuest 2428279185.

[Cwiek-1] Ćwiek, Aleksandra; Fuchs, Susanne; Draxler, Christoph; Asu, Eva Liina; Dediu, Dan; Hiovain, Katri; Kawahara, Shigeto; Koutalidis, Sofia; Krifka, Manfred; Lippus, Pärtel; Lupyan, Gary; Oh, Grace E.; Paul, Jing; Petrone, Caterina; Ridouane, Rachid; Reiter, Sabine; Schümchen, Nathalie; Szalontai, Ádám; Ünal-Logacev, Özlem; Zeller, Jochen; Perlman, Marcus; Winter, Bodo (2022). "The bouba/Kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 377 (1841). doi:10.1098/rstb.2020.0390. PMC 8591387. PMID 34775818.

[:0-2] Peiffer-Smadja, Nathan; Cohen, Laurent (2019-02-01). "The cerebral bases of the bouba-kiki effect". NeuroImage. 186: 679–689. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.11.033. ISSN 1053-8119. PMID 30503933. S2CID 54164828.

[3] Margiotoudi Konstantina and Pulvermüller Friedemann (2020). "Action sound–shape congruencies explain sound symbolism". Scientific Reports. 10 (1): 12706. Bibcode:2020NatSR..1012706M. doi:10.1038/s41598-020-69528-4. PMC 7392762. PMID 32728096. ProQuest 2428279185.

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