Why People Around the Globe Associate the Same Shapes with Words Like "Bouba" and "Kiki"?

When people hear the word circle or razor, more often than not, they will imagine round and sharp objects. At the same time, researchers have analyzed why people around the world, regardless of their dialect, associate the same objects with unique words such as "bouba" and "kiki."

Unraveling the Mysteries of Word-Object Association

(Photo: Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels)

In a linguistics study, researchers were able to show that these words, though they may seem weird and meaningless, makes English speakers think of sharp and blobby objects. A more profoundly extensive study that tested 917 speakers of about 25 different languages and used ten various writing systems found that 72% of the study participants across the languages of the globe would associate "bouba" with blob-like shapes and "kiki" with sharp objects.

Aleksandra Cwiek, a linguistics Ph.D. and lead author of a study published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, titled "The bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems," says that these types of "cross-sensory" links display how people can use meaningless words and vocal noises to evoke concepts without the use of actual languages.

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Bouba and Kiki Phenomenon

Previous researchers pointed to the letter K's spikiness and roundness of the letter B as one of the prominent reasons for the effects of the words "bouba" and "kki" for English-speaking participants. On the other hand, other studies have found that children who haven't learned to read could also make the same associations. Likewise, Himba people in Namibia have very limited contact with Westerners and don't utilize written languages.

To better understand the role of writing in these findings, Cwiek and her team wanted to test participants from a much broader sample of languages, and more importantly, writing systems. Coincidentally, the team was already in the midst of running a larger international experiment across various countries; researchers realized that it was easy to add a bouba-kiki test at the end of the participant's task reports Science.

The team included language speakers from across the globe--from isiZulu, South Africa to Albania-- and various writing systems such as Korean, Georgian, and Thai. Researchers then recorded the two words being said aloud by Cwiek and asked participants to select whether a pointy, blobby, cloud-like, or star-like shape best matched the words on the recording.

As elaborated in the study, the findings suggest that people were able to make genuine associations between the sounds and the shapes. It also adds to a growing amount of evidence that challenges the older linguistic dogma that believes in no relationship between the sounds that make up a word and its meaning, as explained by Science.

It's vital to note that there are vital differences across the languages undertaken by the researchers. Although 75% of speakers that used languages based on the roman alphabet linked, only about 63% of the speakers of other languages like Japanese and Georgian could make the same association.