Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks

I'm not entirely sold by this discovery. For example when you learn to train dogs, you learn about the 3 voices. Encouraging voice, atta boy, negative voice, more stern, and the big "NO!".

To some degree these words type sounding language are doing the same thing. Some sounds will irk, some will soothe, and it would affect this 'evidence' found.

This is just one micro-instance of a much larger thing. Brain encodes structural similarity across modalities. Corollary: language is far from arbitrary labels for things.

Preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.17.594640v1....

Is this not reducible to whether a speech sound contains fricatives and stops or not? They produce spiky sounds

But I guess it's about why so we associate those with spiky shapes, though surely it's because they represent sharp immediate changes in frequency?

I'd be interested on results of shapes imagined when you take the source as musical or other non speech sounds.

I think it’s natural to think of this in terms of frequencies so the kiki shape has a higher visual frequency. As does the word have a higher audio frequencies within in than bouba so that is naturally associated with the lower frequency undulating line of that shape.

What's the N value of this study

baba is keke

All the universal translators in fiction make more sense now lol.

Believe it or not: This is pure and unadulterated advancement of civilization.