Which Is Bouba, and Which Is Kiki?
by Tom Scott
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Sooner or later, I was going to get around to this: it's one of the most famous experiments in linguistics. • Written with Molly Ruhl and Gretchen McCulloch. Gretchen's podcast has an episode all about this: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/175127434871/lingthusiasm-episode-21-what-words-sound-spikyGretchen's book BECAUSE INTERNET, all about the evolution of internet language, is available:🇺🇸 US: https://amzn.to/30tLpjT🇨🇦 CA: https://amzn.to/2JsTYWH🇬🇧 UK: https://amzn.to/31K8eRD(Those are affiliate links that give a commission to me or Gretchen, depending on country!)Graphics by William Marler: https://wmad.co.ukAudio mix by Graham Haerther: https://haerther.netREFERENCES:Köhler, W. (1929). Gestalt Psychology. New York: Liveright.Ramachandran, V. S., Hubbard, E. M. (2001) Synaesthesia—A window into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8: 3–34.Berlin, B. (1994). Evidence for pervasive synesthetic sound symbolism in ethnozoological nomenclature. In L. Hinton, J. Nichols & J. Ohala (Eds.), Sound symbolism (pp. 76 – 93). New York: Cambridge University Press.Davis, R. (1961). The fitness of names to drawings. a cross-cultural study in Tanganyika. Br. J. Psychol. 52, 259–268. doi: 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1961.tb00788.x,Ramachandran, V. S., and Hubbard, E. M. (2001). Synaesthesia—a window into perception, thought and language. J. Conscious. Stud. 8, 3–34.,Koriat, A., & Levy, I. (1979). Figural symbolism in Chinese ideographs. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 8 (4), 353 – 365.Maurer, D., Pathman, T., Mondloch, C.J. (2006). The shape of boubas: sound-shape correspondences in toddlers and adults. Developmental science, Vol.9 (3), p.316-322,Nielsen, A., and Rendall, D. (2011). The sound of round: evaluating the sound-symbolic role of consonants in the classic Takete-Maluma phenomenon. Can. J. Exp. Psychol. 65, 115–124. doi: 10.1037/a0022268,Bremner, A. J., Caparos, S., Davidoff, J., de Fockert, J., Linnell, K. J., and Spence, C. (2013). “Bouba” and “Kiki” in Namibia? A remote culture make similar shape-sound matches, but different shape-taste matches to Westerners. Cognition 126, 165–172. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.09.007De Saussure, F. (2011, republished from 1916). Course in general linguistics. Columbia University Press.Styles, S.J., & Gawne, L. (2017). When Does Maluma/Takete Fail? Two Key Failures and a Meta-Analysis Suggest That Phonology and Phonotactics Matter. I-Perception, 8(4), 2041669517724807.I'm at https://tomscott.com on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott on Facebook at https://facebook.com/tomscott and on Instagram as tomscottgo