Bouba/kiki effect
Non-arbitrary attachment of sounds to object shapes / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The bouba/kiki effect, or kiki/bouba effect, is a non-arbitrary mental association between certain speech sounds and certain visual shapes. Most narrowly, it is the tendency for people, when presented with the nonsense words bouba /ˈbuːbə/ and kiki /ˈkiːkiː/, to associate bouba with a rounded shape and kiki 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,[1] for example including among 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.[1] It has also been shown to occur with familiar names. The effect was investigated using fMRI in 2018.[2] The bouba/kiki effect is one form of sound symbolism.[3]