Bouba vs. kiki: Which sounds rounder, and which is spikier? According to a growing body of research, certain words may appear rounder or spikier according to the sound it makes. If you’re like most people who were asked the same question, you probably saw bouba as a ‘rounder’ word while kiki is a ‘spikier’ word. This is known as the bouba-kiki (or maluma-takete) effect. Why does this happen?
Our senses are connected. The association between sounds (made by b and o vs. k and i) and shapes (round vs. spiky) may be due to the way we say and hear these sounds, where certain sounds take a longer time to say while others can be more sudden or abrupt. Some suggest that it’s because of the way certain words ‘feel’ in our mouth. Others suggest that it’s because of how sounds indicate certain characteristics in real life. For example, in English, words for round things often have ‘round’ sounds, such as blob and bubble, while words for ‘spiky’ things often have ‘spiky’ sounds, such as prickly and perky. This may also help with language learning, where we find it easier to remember words that match what they mean!
What about words that are not in English? Our lab director, Dr Suzy Styles was recently featured in a BBC article, where she shared how this effect seems to evoke different effects with non-English sounding words and non-English speakers.
In a study conducted with her former PhD student Nan Shang, English and English-Mandarin bilinguals were asked to judge two different Mandarin Chinese tones applied to vowels /i/ and /u/: Tone 1 (high and steady), and Tone 4 (low and falling). English-only speakers found the Tone 1 to be ‘sharper’ and ‘spikier’ and the Tone 4 to be ‘smoother’ and ‘rounder’, while Mandarin-dominant speakers made opposing matches. Balanced English-Mandarin bilinguals showed a bivalent pattern; matching the sounds to shapes based on whether they were asked to focus on vowel sounds or tones.
In another study with linguist Dr Lauren Gawne, speakers of Syuba (a language in the Himalayas in Nepal) were presented with the typical bouba-kiki task but they did not make expected rounded vs. spiky sound-shape matches. The researchers believe that since the speech tokens used did not sound like any Syuba words, speakers did not find it as easy to decide. Just like as English speakers, we would struggle to decide if ‘ngf’ sounds ‘spiky’ or ‘round’.
What if Bouba and Kiki were people? Cognitive psychologist Dr David Sidhu and his fellow collaborators found that people with certain names can also be perceived to have ‘rounded’ or ‘spiky’ personalities. Their research found that soft-sounding names like Molly were more likely to be associated with things like being more agreeable and more conscientious, while spikier-sounding names like Kate are thought of as being more extroverted. This same effect was found in their study using French names, Benoit vs. Eric!
Forming judgments: the conclusion. When it comes to people’s personalities, however, they found that sound is not a reliable guide at all. There was no association between someone’s name and their actual personality. In an ongoing study, participants were shown videos of people with supposedly round or spiky names, but preliminary results showed that the names made no difference to their judgment of them. “As you start getting more information about the person, then that actual information about the personality is probably going to override these biases,” says Dr Sidhu. It would appear that sounds are only a small piece of the complex puzzle as we make judgments of what’s around us.
This editorial was adapted from ‘What the sound of your name says about you’ by Sophie Hardach. Click here to read the full article (10-min read): https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210430-what-the-sound-of-your-name-says-about-you.
Click here to read the original research by Nan and Dr Styles (15-min read): https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02139/full
Click here to read about Dr Styles’ and Dr Gawne’s interesting research on bouba-kiki in the Himalayas (5-min read): https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/bites/bouba-kiki-in-the-himalayas/
At the Brain, Language, and Intersensory Perception Lab (BLIP), we’re interested in how learning particular languages might shape the way we experience our world, and how we use different sounds to represent meanings, and different shapes to represent sounds. Follow our Facebook page to get more bite-sized information about language and brain development, and find out how you can join us in our exciting discoveries!