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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bouba/kiki effect | 1/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T15:12:58.334859+00:00 | kb-cron |
The bouba–kiki effect ( BOO-bə KEE-kee) or takete–maluma phenomenon is a non-arbitrary mental association between certain speech sounds and certain visual shapes. The most typical research finding is that people, when presented with nonsense words, tend to associate certain ones (like bouba and maluma) with a rounded shape and other ones (like kiki and takete) with a spiky shape. Its discovery dates back to the 1920s, when psychologists documented experimental participants as connecting nonsense words to shapes in consistent ways. There is a strong general tendency towards the effect worldwide. It has been robustly confirmed across a majority of cultures and languages in which it has been researched; examples include English-speaking American university students, Tamil speakers in India, speakers of certain languages with no writing system, young children, infants, and (though to a much lesser degree) the congenitally blind. It has also been shown to occur with familiar names. The bouba–kiki effect is one form of sound symbolism.
== Research ==
=== Discovery === This effect was first observed by Georgian psychologist Dimitri Uznadze in a 1924 paper. He conducted an experiment with 10 participants who were given a list with nonsense words, shown six drawings for five seconds each, then instructed to pick a name for the drawing from the list of given words. He describes the different "strategies" participants developed to match words to drawings and quotes their reasoning. He also describes situations where participants described very specific forms that they associated with a nonsense word, without reference to the shown drawings. He develops a theory of four factors that influence the way names for objects are decided. In total, there were 42 words. For one particular drawing, 45% picked the same word. For three others, the percentages were 40%. Uznadze points out that this is significantly more overlap than one could expect, given the high number of possible words. He speculates that there must therefore be certain regularities "which the human soul follows in the process of name-giving". German American psychologist Wolfgang Köhler referred to Uznadze's experiment in a 1929 book which showed two forms and asked readers which shape was called "takete" and which was called "maluma". Although he does not say so outright, Köhler implies that there is a strong preference to pair the jagged shape with "takete" and the rounded shape with "maluma". In 2001, V. S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard presented the words "kiki" and "bouba" along with new figures as alternatives to the stimuli used by Köhler. They stated that when asked to guess, 95% of people will select the curvy shape as "bouba" and the jagged one as "kiki".
=== Extension to other contexts ===
==== Cross-language contexts ==== A research experiment was conducted in 2022 that found evidence supporting the idea that the bouba/kiki effect is a cross-cultural phenomenon. 917 participants speaking 25 different languages, with 10 different writing systems, maintain a higher than chance consistency in bouba/kiki identification, intuitively associating the "bouba" with a rounded shape and "kiki" with a sharp, pointed shape, regardless of their native language, though the effect is stronger in some languages than others. It also supports that Roman orthography is a factor that could enhance the bouba/kiki effect. However, this biasing effect of orthography is rather weak since the participants that speak languages with Roman orthography are only marginally more likely to show the bouba/kiki effect.
==== Cross-age contexts ==== Daphne Maurer and colleagues showed that even children as young as 21⁄2 years old may show this preference. More recent work by Özge Öztürk and colleagues in 2013 showed that even 4-month-old infants have the same sound–shape mapping biases as adults and toddlers. Infants are able to differentiate between congruent trials (pairing an angular shape with "kiki" or a curvy shape with "bubu") and incongruent trials (pairing a curvy shape with "kiki" or an angular shape with "bubu"). Infants looked longer at incongruent pairings than at congruent pairings. Infants' mapping was based on the combination of consonants and vowels in the words, and neither consonants nor vowels alone sufficed for mapping. These results suggest that some sound–shape mappings precede language learning, and may in fact aid in language learning by establishing a basis for matching labels to referents and narrowing the hypothesis space for young infants. Adults in this study, like infants, used a combination of consonant and vowel information to match the labels they heard with the shapes they saw. However, this was not the only strategy that was available to them. Adults, unlike infants, were also able to use consonant information alone and vowel information alone to match the labels to the shapes, albeit less frequently than the consonant–vowel combination. When vowels and consonants were put in conflict, adults used consonants more often than vowels.
==== Other contexts where the effect is present ==== The effect has also been shown to emerge in other contexts, such as when words are paired with evaluative meanings (with "bouba" words associated with positive concepts and "kiki" words associated with negative concepts) or when the words to be paired are existing first names, suggesting that some familiarity with the linguistic stimuli does not eliminate the effect. A study showed that individuals will pair names such as "Molly" with round silhouettes, and names such as "Kate" with sharp silhouettes. Moreover, individuals will associate different personality traits with either group of names (e.g., easygoingness with "round names"; determination with "sharp names"). This may hint at a role of abstract concepts in the effect. A study out of the University of Padua discovered the phenomenon is also present in one- and three-day-old baby chickens.