Bouba/Kiki Effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

by thunderbong • 5 years ago

238 94 5 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

yakshaving_jgt• 5 years ago

QI had a look at this about 12 years ago[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDxajXekbaM

gfaure• 5 years ago

There's a Tom Scott video about this with some further academic references: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TDIAObsqcs

Bouba/kiki is most likely a specific instance of the more general notion of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism. Another well-known cross-linguistic association is the one between front vowels and small objects on one hand, and back vowels and large objects on the other.

P-ala-din• 5 years ago

I just watched this video a few hours ago because youtube randomly recommended it to me.

I wonder if it's just the Baader–Meinhof effect or if the post was caused by the same youtube algorithm.

kanbara• 5 years ago

i would use the term frequency illusion, as baader-meinhof refers to a specific instance of someone who coined the term, and are members of a former west german left extremist terrorist group which actually killed people. pretty weird that it continues to be in use, it'd be as if we discovered this effect today and called it the taliban effect or the stalin gulag effect.

Zababa• 5 years ago

I've seen a few time things like that, you often see short and weird videos in the millions of views with everyone saying in the comments that they came suddenly due to the algorithm. I've always had this theory that at some people people (or machines) realized that it's easier to push everyone to have the same tastes compared to catering to every single niche. I think it's an extension of that.

twelvechairs3• 5 years ago

'Symbolism' is a terrible word to describe something like this. Symbols are convention and can change. This is the opposite - an innate cross-sensory connection that will not change.

hyperpape3• 5 years ago

Does a lion symbolize something fierce? The Book of Isaiah notwithstanding, I doubt that symbol will change.

User23• 5 years ago

Charles Sanders Peirce attempted to address this problem with his semiotic[1]. Sadly he never reached a conclusive result, but I find his work in this area to be extremely enlightening and also quite novel even today.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce-semiotics/

dr_dshiv• 5 years ago

Agreed. The presymbolic term people might be looking for is "resonance." Read early JJ Gibson (who introduced affordances). He talks about this dichotomy.

beebmam• 5 years ago

I first learned about this effect from Hempuli, the developer of the game "Baba Is You".

It turns out that "Baba" and "Keke", two named objects that the player can control, were named after this effect! Hempuli talked about this during one of their twitch streams many months back.

(I can't say enough wonderful things about this game)

alserio• 5 years ago

That's exactly what I was wondering. Thank you. And I agree with you, Baba is you is awesome! I really like Hempuli touch also in Noita.

GolDDranks• 5 years ago

I was just coming here to say that! Hempuli studies psychology in uni, he's got always interesting stuff to say about brain quirks and psychological effects.

Exuma• 5 years ago

Wow!!! I've thought my whole life about this at random moments....... when I was a very little kid, maybe 5-10 I used to say certain words and I would get a very intense visualization that would go along with it. The visualization was never of the actual object, but some bizarre shape or pattern, and it would always be the same when I would say that word.

For example the world "girl" would visualize a head of hair with these brown slender shapes that would surround the head and move upwards.

It's really crazy it actually has a name. I noticed as I get older it no longer happens, but I remember it used to happen incredibly intensely when I was young.

armoredkitten• 5 years ago

I have no idea if there's research directly linking the two areas together, but what you're describing sounds more like a form of synesthesia than this more general effect. When I think of "bouba" and "kiki" I don't have any mental visualization...it's just that if I see these shapes and have to name them, one pairing feels a little more "right" than the other. Having mental visualizations associated with particular words, letters, musical notes, etc. is synesthesia. It's also very, very cool. And I guess the article does note near the bottom that there may be some relationship. But the bouba/kiki effect is definitely more widespread than synesthesia.

schoen• 5 years ago

What you experienced might also be more similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia, since the bouba/kiki experiments are mostly about people judging the quality of a match between sounds and pre-prepared images, rather than having them spontaneously visualize images based on the sounds.

Many synesthetes experience a consistent match between words or sounds and visualizations, but not necessarily the same pairing that other people do.

anyfoo• 5 years ago

Makes me wonder if young children generally have some form of Synesthesia, when the brain still develops, that then subsides in most adults.

While I had practically forgotten it until you mentioned it, I had similar experiences, for example the french song "au clair de la lune" always evoked the same, very vivid (but rather abstract) picture in my mind. To my child mind, it was so intense that the song was that picture to me.

Nowadays this doesn't happen...

jvanderbot2• 5 years ago

This is how I remember numbers, spelling, and names sometimes. A sequence of numbers has a nice plot / wave to it. I can't say my mapping from these categories to shapes generalizes for anyone else and it hasn't made me particularly good at memory competitions. It's just how it works.

Also, memorizing a couple of credit card's information has saved me so much time -- highly recommended.

codezero5• 5 years ago

This is intriguing, can you describe in more detail how you map a series of numbers to a shape/sound?

like is 1234 a slope /

jraph• 5 years ago

It sounds like synesthesia. Some people see the year as ring-shaped in their head. The "visualization" is consistent during the lifetime and can help memorizing dates.

I don't have this, though I do have a consistent "visualization" of numbers under one hundred (and, yes, months, and days of months, and weeks) since very young. Probably helps a bit to memorize some stuff, though I can't compare with the same me deprived of this view. I'm not great at remembering birthdays but not terrible either.

People with such visualizations don't even always realize not all people see them the same way, or at all for that matter.

jvanderbot2• 5 years ago

Yes. In fact there's almost no "entropy" to remember in 1234 because it perfectly matches a 45 deg slope. I just have to remember it starts at ground and has length 4.

A seq like 1244 has a bit more entropy with the "bump" where the 3 should be, so it's easier to see it as a slope of length 2 starting at 12, or some "busy-beaver" like sequence that starts gradual and curves rapidly up to 44. The bump at 3 seems most natural.

A long sequence of numbers looks like monotonically increasing groups or strings, and the curve is easy to remember. Is it a log-like plot, a hyperbolic curve, parabola, saw tooth, line, etc? I usually end up finding a curve that has fewer deviations and matches the numbers nicely. I just have to remember how long each sequence was.

Like this:

1234567788100

1/7, length 7. 77/99, length 3, except +1 where the 99 should be. It's kind of clumsy with text, easier with pictures and dots, like seeing wood grain or stars. All you need is the "origin" coordinate frame. There's still numbers, but the lines help keep the memory of the relationship more natural.

Words are the same. Sounds angle up and down and squiggle back sometimes. It's why my handwriting is so terrible I think. Probably this is how shorthand was developed, so I don't think it's all that unique to me.

From there, numbers->sounds is easy enough but never helped me remember things. What helps is the ridge-lines and parabolas.

matsemann• 5 years ago

A Norwegian newspaper did a deep dive a few years ago about how people visualize the year. Crazy how different people are, I ended up in discussions with many people during that week hearing lots of different variations. Your description of waves reminded me about it, since it's almost how I view time. Like a sinus wave where the valley is the summer. But zoomable with smaller waves so the months and weeks also are waves on top of the big wave.

https://nrkbeta.no/2018/01/01/this-is-what-the-year-actually...

nerdponx2• 5 years ago

Apparently this is a well-established memorization technique. Pretty interesting if you figured this out independently!

I have also heard that this same technique might be the basis for at least some myths and other sacred stories, wherein a myth arises as a mnemonic for something important like an agricultural cycle or migration path.

If anyone knows names of researchers in this area or books on the topic I would be very interested to follow up on it.

wyager2• 5 years ago

Bouba/Kiki are onomatopoeia for the sounds objects of those shapes are liable to make if you drop them or otherwise physically interact with them. Bouba is probably soft/flexible and Kiki is probably hard/rigid.

silicon2401• 5 years ago

There is no inherent association with shape and substance. Leaves/flowers can be pointy like the kiki shape and fall softly and limply, whereas rocks are ubiquitous, round, and solid.

Tade0• 5 years ago

Perhaps it's the sound they make when they're eaten?

Bouba sounds like something that doesn't require a lot of chewing.

starfallg• 5 years ago

The association is with how the sounds are vocalised and the shapes we make with our mouths.

andrewflnr• 5 years ago

Leaves and flowers are still mostly curvy. I can't think of anything soft that has straight lines meeting at sharp angles. Rigidity is physically necessary for maintaining that shape long term.

On the other side, you rarely see rocks with extended round parts meeting at sharp, concave angles. A lot if not most things that look like that are soft.

It's not a perfect correlation, but it does seem like a real one to me.

wyager2• 5 years ago

99.9% of concave rocks are pointy, not smooth. Almost no rocks look like bouba.

Very few leaves look like Kiki. Most are rounded. Leaves also aren’t the kind of physical objects you would typically interact with physically as a baby learning about kinematics.

elihu• 5 years ago

That was my initial reaction. "kiki" sounds like hard, sharp things clattering against each other like rocks or broken glass, and "bouba" sounds like something flexible and bouncy.

jxramos2• 5 years ago

I've wondered if languages which "score" well in leveraging this sort of mapping just make it easier to juggle complex subjects by using more "efficient" parts of our mental stack that position conversation to go deeper on any point of interest just because it's less energy intensive or something along those lines. Something akin to a mental locality of concepts if you will. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect#Implications...

jxramos2• 5 years ago

ps it's a joy to watch VS Ramachandran get excited about synesthesia, definitely worth hunting down videos of him on YouTube.

horse666• 5 years ago

Yes, absolutely! I loved listening to the Reith lectures many, many years ago, when Vilayanur Ramachandran gave them. You can still listen to them here, http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/

In Lecture 4 (Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese) he talks about the Kiki / Bouba effect. His enunciation is amazing.

arketyp• 5 years ago

I wonder to what extent intra-language selection of synesthetic words occur along these lines when there are competing synonyms/alleles. Onomatopoetic words could be favored for instance, but also words that in written form look like the thing they're describing, e.g. (from the top of my head): "bomb", "locomotive", "ghost", "teeth" etc.

anigbrowl3• 5 years ago

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.

Well, no shit - that's why we refer to onomatopoeia, a word which probably has far wider currency than others of similar provenance like poiesis.

I'll add a conjecture that similar disparities exist in vowels, with e and i being considered slender while a, o, and u are considered broad.

renewiltord2• 5 years ago

Well, no shit,...

It is fascinating how many science grants we could save on if we just asked HN commenters to describe the world. To think that we might have reached such knowledge about human beings by just asking HN to tell us about the world.

Eat your heart out, Karl Popper. It appears that Keats wins the day.

anigbrowl3• 5 years ago

Consulting people who are intuitively skilled in some area can often be a good way to get a head start on understanding a problem. Given the seeming universality of imitation in humans, the assumption of complete arbitrariness actually seems like the bolder claim.

andrewmcwatters• 5 years ago

You jest, but there’s some sobering truth to the reality that knowledge is not readily distributed amongst humanity.

Some here in the US were searching for organic solutions to eliminating plastic waste, but there was a whole demographic that said, “Well, duh” when it was discovered that a particular worm ate plastic. For them it was just a part of observational life.

haecceity2• 5 years ago

I don't get it? What's the significance of this? I thought the left one is bam/pow and the right one is a blob?

GuB-42• 5 years ago

It is a binary choice, either you call the left shape bouba and the right shape kiki, or you call the left shape kiki and the right shape bouba, you can't use any other name.

The interesting part is that everyone gives the same answer, regardless of culture and language.

alok99• 5 years ago

From the article: Without being told which shape was which,

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 in a consistent way

So apart from visually impaired (from birth) people, we may have a pattern in mapping shapes to phonemes.

saberdancer• 5 years ago

My guess is that the shape of our mouth/tongue makes us choose "bouba" for the rounded shape.

haecceity2• 5 years ago

Why did I choose something else??

robbie-c• 5 years ago

As someone who has trouble remembering which way round Type 1 and Type 2 decisions are defined, I have started calling them Bouba and Kiki decisions.

It doesn't help whatsoever but it does wind up my cofounder ;)

quickthrower2• 5 years ago

Type X where X is the number of ways through the door.

Type 1 is a one way door, no return!

Type 2 is a 2 way door.

I’d probably label type 1 a kiki (a pointy decision … beware!)

growup12345• 5 years ago

So either I have autism, or this is complete bogus research

incrudible• 5 years ago

Bouba... a woody sort of word.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulNWr-yBWP8

wk0• 5 years ago

Cool to see this on HN -- I wrote a program for a psych lab in college that was exploring this effect. The idea was to see if homogenous sensory stimuli had a faster reaction time & accuracy compared to disparate ones.

eg. Was the response to [ Bouba-like image + Bouba-like audio ] faster/more accurate than [ Bouba-like image + Kiki-like audio ]

Seemed like it may provide some insight into speech perception and synesthesia.

howaboutnope• 5 years ago

I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned already:

http://www.montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Series_4/23.htm

kazinator2• 5 years ago

The primary author of the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar book series, Makino Seiichi, presents a related hypothesis about sound symbolism in Japanese. He identifies a pattern that "hard" sounds like K often appear with words associated with distance between the speaker and the subject, whereas sounds like N are associated with less distance.

For instance, the clause nominalizing particle KOTO expresses a more objective view compared to NO.

Piano-wo hiku-no ga taihen. (Playing the piano is difficult (for me, because of arthritis or whatever)).

Piano-wo hiku-koto ga taihen. (Playing the piano is difficult (as such, for humans)).

The Japanese onomatopoeia is full of this also. For instance something lightly rolling is korokoro, whereas gorogoro refers to heavy rolling.

Sparkling, glittering: kirakira (-suru).

Slithering, wriggling, sliding: nyoro-nyoro.

Another example of sound symbolism in the grammar: questions.

The ka particle is the most direct question marker. If, say, you're scolding a child and want to say "are you listening to me?" angrily: kiiteiru-ka?

A soft way, with a completely different nuance, would be: kiiteiru-no?

See? "ka" is a hard sound with an unvoiced consonant at the front, full of high frequency content, like an object breaking, whereas "no" is low frequency.

antiterra• 5 years ago

But koko/kore/kono vs soko/sore/sono doesn’t seem to match that hypothesis. How do you make sure you’ve got enough examples to prove the argument?

wodenokoto• 5 years ago

The structure of the argument as presented in the book is

“we see this sound symbolism in onomatopoeia” and gives a very large list of examples, followed by “this can be used to explain other phenomenons such as [insert parents statement]”

You are right that it is interesting how and if ko-so-a-do fits this pattern, but I don’t think it’s a “gotcha” against sound symbolism in Japanese.

kazinator2• 5 years ago

That's not clear to me; I am not a researcher within the linguistic field.

What is clear is that the hypothesis cannot be some strawman like "every corner of the Japanese language exhibits hard/soft sound symbolism: every grammar construct, every vocabulary item, ...".

How much there has to be to separate a trend from coincidence is beyond me, but ways of quantifying it suggest themselves. For instance, frequency of occurrence of sound-symbolic constructs in speech.

Some pretty common devices fit this pattern. Another one is kara (strong assertion of causality) versus no de (weak assertion of causality). Words like koto, kara, keredomo and the question particle ka come up all the time, as do no, node, noni and so on.

a0-prw• 5 years ago

Slithering, wriggling, sliding: nyoro-nyoro

Fun coincidence: snake in Zulu is inyoka or nyova

jamilabreu• 5 years ago

Love discovering random Wikipedia articles! Just this week I started a newsletter about the random articles I come across:

https://randomwalk.substack.com/

Going to use this one in my next email :)

gre• 5 years ago

"If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I'd say Flippy, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong, though. It's Hambone."

-Jack Handy

dcow2• 5 years ago

So now we’re going to have to check our internal shape bias and correct algorithms that encode as much into classification of arbitrary objects. Great.

310260• 5 years ago

I'm gonna assume you're kidding.

dcow2• 5 years ago

I wish I were 100% kidding.

qalmakka• 5 years ago

If I think about it I've always instinctively associated unvoiced sounds like /k/ and /t/ to sharper shapes, and sounds like /b/ or /v/ to "rounder", softer shapes. I think that voicing makes everything "smoother", in some way?

jzshen• 5 years ago

This totally works for other things. "Mamy", "sira", "sakai", are words for various tastes (eg spicy) in Malagasy and I thought that they just sounded 'right' when I first heard them.

(mamy:sweet, sira:salty, sakai:spicy)

Hokusai• 5 years ago

I had a similar discussion about naming evolution and using "Borg" as shorthand for duplicating machine (I think that it is not a great word for this use): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27869571

It is always possible to create completely arbitrary words, but long term the ones that survive are the ones that fit in the language current state and evolution.

jhoechtl• 5 years ago

Simply imagine what sound a 3D-object of the shape as in the WP-article would make.

The star-shaped object would make a "spiky" sound, the bubble-like object more of a bump-like sound. That explains the attribution of the words kiki and bouba to the objects in different cultures. My explanation.

IshKebab• 5 years ago

Yeah it seems kind of obvious really. But still interesting.

kangalioo2• 5 years ago

Make a sound how? When dropping the 3d object onto the ground? Or when making it resonate at its natural frequency, or something else?

loa_in_• 5 years ago

What would fit GP comment is: spin along the central axis perpendicular to the plane of spikes/bumps with a constant angular velocity.

bagacrap• 5 years ago

The words spike, bubble and bump seem to be examples of this effect, not really explanations of it.

kangalioo2• 5 years ago

There's an interesting symmetry between the image and sound frequencies

"kiki" has lots of high frequencies: the i and the click sound of the k. Sharp corners also have lots of high "frequencies", but in the 2d domain.

There's an equivalent symmetry, except with low frequencies, with "bouba" and the rounded shape.

I feel like this can't be a coincidence

nerdponx2• 5 years ago

Xophmeister• 5 years ago

Many years ago, I wrote a blog -- no longer online, I'm afraid -- about how I associated different programming languages with different shapes. I've never heard of this effect before today, but it visualises almost perfectly what I was trying to express all those years ago. (I originally posited that it was some form of synaesthesia.)

For example, Python has a rounded or smoother shape, whereas C-style languages are more kiki-like (with JavaScript being the spikiest); Haskell, IIRC, had a squarish lump kind of appearance. I originally wrote myself off, thinking that maybe the shapes very loosely correspond to how the code looks in each language "from a distance", but I was never really satisfied with that.

deathwarmedover• 5 years ago

You could check if it made it into archive.org?

jetson• 5 years ago

I have noticed a similar effect when I encounter the words for 'hot' and 'cold' in an unfamiliar language.

Bouba/Kiki Effect

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