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Concept
Bouba/kiki effect
Summary
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 ˈbu:bə and kiki ˈki:ki:, 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, 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) individuals who are congenitally blind. It has also been shown to occur with familiar names. The effect was investigated using fMRI in 2018. The bouba/kiki effect is one form of sound symbolism.
This effect was first observed by Georgian psychologist Dimitri Uznadze in a 1924 paper. He conducted an experiment with 10 participants who were given a list with nonsense words, shown 6 drawings for 5 seconds each, then had to pick a name for the drawing from the list of given words. He describes the different "strategies" participants developed to match words to drawings and quotes their reasoning. He also describes situations where participants described very specific forms that they associated with a nonsense word, without reference to the shown drawings. He develops a theory of four factors that influence the way names for objects are decided.
In total there were 42 words. For one particular drawing, 45% picked the same word. For three others, the percentages were 40%. Uznadze points out that this is significantly more overlap than one could expect, given the high number of possible words. He speculates that there must therefore be certain regularities "which the human soul follows in the process of name-giving".
Official source
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