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=                         Bouba/kiki_effect                          =
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                            Introduction
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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 takete–maluma phenomenon is a
non-arbitrary mental association between certain speech sounds and
certain visual shapes. The most typical research finding is that
people, when presented with nonsense words, tend to associate certain
ones (like 'bouba' and 'maluma') with a rounded shape and other ones
(like 'kiki' and 'takete') 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) the
congenitally blind. It has also been shown to occur with familiar
names. The bouba-kiki effect is one form of sound symbolism.


Discovery
===========
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 six
drawings for five seconds each, then instructed 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".

German American psychologist Wolfgang Köhler referred to Uznadze's
experiment in a 1929 book which showed two forms and asked readers
which shape was called "takete" and which was called "maluma".
Although he does not say so outright, Köhler implies that there is a
strong preference to pair the jagged shape with "takete" and the
rounded shape with "maluma".


Cross-language contexts
=========================
In 2001, V. S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard repeated Köhler's
experiment, introducing the words "kiki" and "bouba", and asked
American college undergraduates and Tamil speakers in India, "Which of
these shapes is bouba and which is kiki?" In both groups, 95% to 98%
selected the curvy shape as "bouba" and the jagged one as "kiki",
suggesting that the human brain somehow attaches abstract meanings to
the shapes and sounds consistently.

A research experiment was conducted in 2022 that found evidence
supporting the idea that the bouba/kiki effect is a cross-cultural
phenomenon. 917 participants speaking 25 different languages, with 10
different writing systems, maintain a higher than chance consistency
in bouba/kiki identification, intuitively associating the "bouba" with
a rounded shape and "kiki" with a sharp, pointed shape, regardless of
their native language, though the effect is stronger in some languages
than others. It also supports that Roman orthography is a factor that
could enhance the bouba/kiki effect. However, this biasing effect of
orthography is rather weak since the participants that speak languages
with Roman orthography are only marginally more likely to show the
bouba/kiki effect.


Cross-age contexts
====================
Daphne Maurer and colleagues showed that even children as young as 2
years old may show this preference. More recent work by Ozge Ozturk
and colleagues in 2013 showed that even 4-month-old infants have the
same sound-shape mapping biases as adults and toddlers. Infants are
able to differentiate between congruent trials (pairing an angular
shape with "kiki" or a curvy shape with "bubu") and incongruent trials
(pairing a curvy shape with "kiki" or an angular shape with "bubu").
Infants looked longer at incongruent pairings than at congruent
pairings. Infants' mapping was based on the combination of consonants
and vowels in the words, and neither consonants nor vowels alone
sufficed for mapping. These results suggest that some sound-shape
mappings precede language learning, and may in fact aid in language
learning by establishing a basis for matching labels to referents and
narrowing the hypothesis space for young infants. Adults in this
study, like infants, used a combination of consonant and vowel
information to match the labels they heard with the shapes they saw.
However, this was not the only strategy that was available to them.
Adults, unlike infants, were also able to use consonant information
alone and vowel information alone to match the labels to the shapes,
albeit less frequently than the consonant-vowel combination. When
vowels and consonants were put in conflict, adults used consonants
more often than vowels.


Other contexts where the effect is present
============================================
The effect has also been shown to emerge in other contexts, such as
when words are paired with evaluative meanings (with "bouba" words
associated with positive concepts and "kiki" words associated with
negative concepts) or when the words to be paired are existing first
names, suggesting that some familiarity with the linguistic stimuli
does not eliminate the effect. A study showed that individuals will
pair names such as "Molly" with round silhouettes, and names such as
"Kate" with sharp silhouettes. Moreover, individuals will associate
different personality traits with either group of names (e.g.,
easygoingness with "round names"; determination with "sharp names").
This may hint at a role of abstract concepts in the effect.


Contexts where the effect is smaller or absent
================================================
Other research suggests that this effect does not occur in all
communities, and it appears that the effect breaks if the sounds do
not make licit words in the language. The bouba-kiki effect seems to
be dependent on a long sensitive period, with high visual capacities
in childhood being necessary for its typical development. Although the
congenitally blind have been reported to show a bouba-kiki effect,
they show a much smaller one for touched shapes than sighted
individuals do for visual shapes.


Languages with little observed effect
=======================================
A major 2021 study showed that certain languages, namely Mandarin
Chinese, Turkish, Romanian, and Albanian, on average showed
lower-than-50% matches for both associating bouba with roundedness and
kiki with jaggedness. However, the authors consider their analysis
conservative and not clear enough to confirm if these four
definitively lacked the bouba–kiki phenomenon. For example, the
phonetic structures of these languages or their participants' cultural
associations with sound and shape could have led to the weaker
correlations observed. Further research is being conducted to further
verify the correlation between low-effect languages and the bouba-kiki
phenomenon.


Neuroscience
==============
In 2019, Nathan Peiffer-Smadja and Laurent Cohen published the first
study using fMRI to explore the bouba-kiki effect. They found that
prefrontal activation is stronger to mismatching (bouba with spiky
shape) than to matching (bouba with round shape) stimuli. A subsequent
study by Kelly McCormick and colleagues reported a similar pattern of
greater activation for mismatched word-shape stimuli, but with most
activity in parietal regions including the intraparietal sulcus and
supramarginal gyrus, regions known to play a role in sensory
association and perceptual-motor processing. Peiffer-Smadja and Cohen
also found that sound-shape matching also influences activations in
the auditory and visual cortices, suggesting an effect of matching at
an early stage in sensory processing.


Implications for understanding language
=========================================
Ramachandran and Hubbard suggest that the kiki/bouba effect has
implications for the evolution of language, because it suggests that
the naming of objects is not completely arbitrary. The rounded shape
may most commonly be named "bouba" because the mouth makes a more
rounded shape to produce that sound while a more taut, angular mouth
shape is needed to make the sounds in "kiki". Alternatively, the
distinction may be between coronal or dorsal consonants like  and
labial consonants like , or, as Fort and Schwartz suggest, the
difference may be attributed to the noise a "bouba" shape makes when
bounced (lower frequency and more continuous) in comparison to a
spiked object. Additionally, it was shown that it is not only
different consonants (e.g., voiceless versus voiced) and different
vowel qualities (e.g.,  versus ) that play a role in the effect, but
also vowel quantity (long versus short vowels). In one study,
participants rated words containing long vowels to refer to longer
objects and short vowels to short objects, at least for languages that
make a vowel length distinction.  The presence of these
"synesthesia-like mappings" suggest that this effect may be the
neurological basis for sound symbolism, in which sounds are
non-arbitrarily mapped to objects and events in the world. Research
has also indicated that the effect may be a case of ideasthesia, a
phenomenon in which activations of concepts (inducers) evoke
perception-like experiences (concurrents). The name comes from the
Greek 'idea' and 'aisthesis', meaning "sensing concepts" or "sensing
ideas", and was introduced by Danko Nikolić.


                              See also
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* Color symbolism
* Japanese sound symbolism
* Origin of language
* Semiotics
* Universal language


                          Further reading
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*  This study tested the bouba/kiki effect in Kanzi, a
language-competent bonobo, finding that non-human primates did not
demonstrate the same shape-sound association as humans, hinting at a
possible human-specific ability tied to language exposure.
* Chen, S., & Maurer, D. (2022). 'The Bouba/Kiki Effect in Early
Childhood: Evidence from Preschoolers.' Developmental Science, 25(5),
e13277. This developmental study provides insights into how young
children perceive sound-symbolic shapes, indicating that the
bouba/kiki effect may emerge in early childhood, potentially pointing
to innate sound-shape associations that become refined with language
exposure.
* Allison Parshall, "Pain Language: The sound of 'ow' transcends
borders", 'Scientific American', vol. 332, no. 2 (February 2025), pp.
16-18.   "Many languages have an interjection word for expressing
pain. [Katarzyna Pisanski 'et al.', writing in the 'Journal of the
Acoustical Society of America', have] found that pain interjections
tend to contain the vowel sound 'ah' (written as [a] in the
International Phonetic Alphabet) and letter combinations that
incorporate it, such as 'ow' and 'ai.' These patterns may point back
to the origins of human language itself." (p. 16.) "Researchers are
continually discovering cases of symbolism, or sound iconicity, in
which a word's intrinsic nature has some connection to its meaning.
These cases run counter to decades of linguistic theory, which had
regarded language as fundamentally arbitrary... [Many words
onomatopoeically imitate a sound. Also] there's the 'bouba-kiki'
effect, whereby people from varying cultures are more likely to
associate the nonsense word 'bouba' with a rounded shape and 'kiki'
with a spiked one.... [S]omehow we all have a 'feeling' about this,'
says Aleksandra Ćwiek... [She and her colleagues have] show[n] that
people associate the trilled 'R' sound with roughness and the 'L'
sound with smoothness. Mark Dingemanse... in 2013 found [that] the
conversational 'Huh?' and similar words in other languages may be
universal." (p. 18.)


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