KiKi/ Bouba - further research

Take a look at the two shapes in the image above. Imagine they were real-world objects that you’d found, and you had to give them a name – one has to be called ‘bouba’, and the other has to be called ‘kiki’. Which name would you assign to which object? 

It probably makes intuitive sense to assume that the way that we map sounds onto objects, with the exception of onomatopoeias, is arbitrary. Take the word ‘ball’ for example - at face value, there’s nothing obvious that links the actual spherical object with the name that we’ve assigned to it. But is this mapping truly, completely random? 

In 2001, UCSD scholars VS Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard asked a group of participants a similar question to the one posed above, in which they had to guess which of the two figures was a Martian ‘bouba’, and which was a ‘kiki’. 95% of those participants picked the left object for kiki, and the right object for bouba, even though these were completely novel words being matched with drawings that they had never seen before.

What’s going on? The bouba/kiki effect actually finds its origins in much earlier work, by German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in 1929. The experimental setup was essentially the same. Köhler showed people shapes similar to the ones above, and asked them which was a ‘takete’ and which was a ‘malumba’. By now you can guess what the majority of participants said.

Why this phenomenon occurs isn’t entirely clear, but Ramachandran and Hubbard have speculated that it may be due to the nature of the connections that exist between sensory and motor areas of the brain. For example, the visual shape of the object - either round or spiky - is linked to the shape that our lips make when we say that corresponding word - either open and rounded, or narrow and wide. In turn, this is linked to the way that our tongue moves in order to generate the word itself; kiki requires you to make a ‘sharp’ movement of the tongue on your palate, where as bouba involves a more ‘rounded’ movement. These similarities all increase the likelihood that bouba will be linked to the rounded object, and kiki to the sharper, spikier object. In later work in 2003, Ramachandran and Hubbard provided supporting evidence for this theory. In that paper, they found that damage to an area of the brain important for language called the angular gyrus resulted in a person being much less likely to match the rounded object with the word bouba. 

The effect is interesting, because it helps us to shed light on the potential evolutionary origins of language. The fact that so many people, and even young children, tend to consistently assign a sharp word to a spiky object suggests that, at least in some situations, the way that we map sounds onto objects isn’t random. Instead, there’s some sort of natural constraint or system in place that helps us to build those maps. And while having that sort of framework on its own might not be fully sufficient for language to have originally developed, it may at least have provided a building block for the emergence of verbal communication.