The bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems

Author:

Ćwiek Aleksandra12ORCID,Fuchs Susanne1ORCID,Draxler Christoph3,Asu Eva Liina4,Dediu Dan5ORCID,Hiovain Katri6,Kawahara Shigeto7,Koutalidis Sofia8,Krifka Manfred12,Lippus Pärtel4,Lupyan Gary9ORCID,Oh Grace E.10,Paul Jing11,Petrone Caterina12,Ridouane Rachid13,Reiter Sabine14,Schümchen Nathalie15,Szalontai Ádám16,Ünal-Logacev Özlem17,Zeller Jochen18,Perlman Marcus19ORCID,Winter Bodo19ORCID

Affiliation:

1. Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, 10117 Berlin, Germany

2. Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 10099 Berlin, Germany

3. Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig Maximilian University, 80799 Munich, Germany

4. Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics, University of Tartu, 50090 Tartu, Estonia

5. Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage UMR 5596, Université Lumière Lyon 2, 69363 Lyon, France

6. Department of Digital Humanities, University of Helsinki, 00014 Helsinki, Finland

7. The Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies, Keio University, Mita Minatoku, Tokyo 108-8345, Japan

8. Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies, Bielefeld University, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany

9. Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA

10. Department of English Language and Literature, Konkuk University, Seoul 05029, South Korea

11. Asian Studies Program, Agnes Scott College, Decatur, GA 30030, USA

12. Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, Laboratoire Parole et Langage, UMR 7309, 13100 Aix-en-Provence, France

13. Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie, UMR 7018, CNRS and Sorbonne Nouvelle, 75005 Paris, France

14. Depto. de Polonês, Alemão e Letras Clássicas, Universidade Federal do Paraná, 80060-150 Curitiba, Brazil

15. Department of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark, 5230 Odense, Denmark

16. Department of Phonetics, Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest 1068, Hungary

17. School of Health Sciences, Department of Speech and Language Therapy, Istanbul Medipol University, 34810 Istanbul, Turkey

18. School of Arts, Linguistics Discipline, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041, South Africa

19. Department of English Language and Linguistics, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK

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 experiment that tested the bouba/kiki effect across speakers of 25 languages representing nine language families and 10 writing systems. Overall, we found strong evidence for the effect across languages, with bouba eliciting more congruent responses than kiki . Participants who spoke languages with Roman scripts were only marginally more likely to show the effect, and analysis of the orthographic shape of the words in different scripts showed that the effect was no stronger for scripts that use rounder forms for bouba and spikier forms for kiki . These results confirm that the bouba/kiki phenomenon is rooted in crossmodal correspondence between aspects of the voice and visual shape, largely independent of orthography. They provide the strongest demonstration to date that the bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)’.

Funder

IDEXLYON Fellowship grant

DFG XPrag.de

Publisher

The Royal Society

Subject

General Agricultural and Biological Sciences,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology

Reference109 articles.

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