Bouba/kiki effect 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 describes a tendency for people to consistently associate certain speech sounds with particular visual shapes. This phenomenon was first explored in the 1920s by psychologist Wolfgang Köhler, who showed participants two abstract shapes: one rounded and blob-like, and the other sharp and spiky.
Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords “kiki” and “bouba” with spiky and round shapes, respectively, a phenomenon named the bouba-kiki effect. To explore the origin of this association, and whether it is unique to humans, ...
Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve ...
The crossmodal correspondence between some speech sounds and some geometrical shapes, known as the bouba-kiki (BK) effect, constitutes a remarkable ex…
Abstract The bouba/kiki effect—the association of the nonce word bouba with a round shape and kiki with a spiky shape—is a type of correspondence between speech sounds and visual properties with potentially deep implications for the evolution of spoken language. However, there is debate over the robustness of the effect across cultures and the influence of orthography. We report an online ...
The bouba-kiki effect might have played a role in the emergence of language, along with many other cognitive faculties.
The Bouba-Kiki effect is a well-known synaesthesia where people are likely to assign specific, but nonsense words, like “Bouba” and "Kiki," to correspond with specific shapes—round and spiky, respectively.