I’m interested in this idea of a natural link in the human brain between abstract properties of shape and sound.
Originally put forth by Wolfgang Kohler in the late 1920s, and more recently revived by Ramachandran and Hubbard in 2001, this experiment has quite interesting results:
Look at the image below.
One of the shapes is named ‘bouba’ and the other ‘kiki’. Which is which?
Findings show that between 95% to 98% of respondents call the white cloud shape ‘bouba’ and the black spikes ‘kiki’. The only group with no preference either way are autistic people.
I think we can see a similar feature in Japanese with words like とげとげしい (barbed, stinging, biting). The word とげ itself, for me, really gives off the image of a thorn. I can say that with confidence because Japanese isn’t my native language, but the word struck me as accurate when I first learned it many years ago. I couldn’t make the same claim with a word like ’sting’ because I can’t confidently claim whether the image is a result of knowing the word, or the other way around.
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Nice, but is it influenced by the shape of the written letters, or the sounds?
kiki きき = sharp characters
bouba ぼうば = rounder characters
In Japanese and English both, these words have the same characteristics (tho slightly less so in Japanese), as well the fact that you make an ‘o’ with your mouth for bouba.
You have to be careful of the results on so small a study.
Disclaimer: I haven’t read the study, just this post about it.
I don’t think it was a small study. Quite large and spanning multiple decades, actually.
Have you ever read a Dr. Seuss book and wondered how all of the names he gives his wonderful creations seem to fit so well? This is the theory that sets out to explain it. It’s essentially synesthesia as a basis of visuals into language.
Part of the study shows toddlers (illiterate) apply the same choices, so it doesn’t have to do with the shape of the letters. Perhaps it’s actually the opposite – Maybe letters are the shapes that they are because they represent visually the sounds we perceive.
That’s because autistic people are the best =) (my brother is)
I have no preference either, I wonder why?
Interesting^^
I’d need to know more about the parameters of this study. Saying certain sounds “feel right” just seems terribly vague to me. What are the criteria? And are people’s subjective experiences that easily quantified? I’m not convinced that if the experiment had come up with the opposite result, we still wouldn’t be able to rationalise it.
And as for letters “representing” sounds in some natural way, I direct you to the counterexample of the Cree Syllabry, where non-English speaking Cree adopted English letters to represent sounds in their own language, with no actual relation between the sound represented in English and that in Cree.
I beg your pardon, I meant to say Cherokee syllabary, not Cree.
I thought the other way around. My reasoning I think is that kiki sounds cuter to me and so it got the rounded and white shape. Eep!
lol….
yeah i was wrong as well,
“kiki” sounded soft to me so i chose the cloud
and likewise i chose bouba for the “spikey” thing
i dunno what that says about me
“Mais qui sont ces serpents qui sifflent sur nos têtes?”
This idea is way way wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy older than the 1920s. Tons of authors have tried to use certain souds to convey ideas and emotions, including this quote above which is an immensely famous alliteration by Jean Racine (I’m french, and every literary person in France knows this one) and is meant to carry an idea of slyness and evoke snakes with all those “s” sounds.
You can find the idea that names have a “natural” origin, for example that certain letters and sounds “naturally” convey ideas like roundness or softness in Plato’s Cratylus. The whole dialogue is a discussion of that idea. So yeah the idea has been there for a long long time!
Oops I posted anyway but I realized a bit late that this discussion is old. Sorry!
No discussion is old on this site – All topics are always open for debate.
Thanks for your addition!