By Erik Borda The creation of language is one of the first paradoxes you may encounter in your early years. Many children become confused when they consider that the languages we use every day didn't always exist. How did the first people decide on what sounds held certain meanings if they couldn't communicate? Were these sounds mapped to words completely by random? According to a simple test, we may be able to deduce how certain sounds were assigned to objects in early language. The bouba/kiki experiment was carried out in 2001 by two psychologists from the University of San Diego California named VS Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard. In the experiment, a group of participants were shown two shapes to which they had to assign the names 'bouba' and 'kiki'. The participants were never given a definition of these two words or any indication that they belonged to either of the two shapes, however 95% of participants named the rounded shape bouba and the spiny shape kiki. Although this phenomenon was brought to the public attention in 2001, it had been observed as far back as 1929 when a German psychologist known as Wolfgang Köhler conducted a similar test with 'bouba' being replaced with 'malumba' and 'kiki' being replaced with 'katake'. Once again, participants in this experiment assigned the rounded shape to malumba and the spiny shape to katake, suggesting that the bouba/kiki effect may manifest in participants of different languages. It is not clear why this trend occurs, but Ramachandran and Hubbard have speculated that it is caused by a connection between the sensory and motor parts of the brain that associate the shape one's mouth makes while saying 'bouba' or 'kiki' with the shape of the figure presented. One must make a narrow shape with their lips and a sharp tongue movement to say the name 'kiki', while 'bouba' requires a wider shape of the lips and movement of the tongue. This causes the brain to connect the word 'kiki' with a shape covered with sharp points and 'bouba' with a round or amorphous figure. Since so many subjects, especially children, are predisposed to follow the bouba/kiki effect, this suggests a predictable trend to how sounds were first assigned to objects and it may have been a critical step in the development of language.
Though this phenomenon may seem to have little impact in your daily life, it may subtly influence how people expect you to look based upon your name. According to another experiment done by two scholars of the Department of Psychology from the University of Otago, the bouba/kiki effect can extend to facial features. In their first study, they had 30 participants rank the order of how fitting six names were for twenty male faces. Ten of these faces were round, while the other ten were angular. Similarly, three of the names required narrow movements of the lips and tongue while the other three required wider movements. For eight out of ten of the round faces the associated name was given at a greater rank on average and the same thing occurred nine out of ten times for the angular faces. This suggests that people will naturally expect your face to look either round or angular depending on your name. I find the bouba/kiki effect to be intriguing linguistically, but as someone with a "sharp" first name and a "round" last name, I'm somewhat conflicted about its social effects. Source: Etchells, P. (2016, October 17). The bouba/kiki effect: How do we link shapes to sounds? Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2016/oct/17/the-boubakiki-effect-how-do-we-link-shapes-to-sounds Barton, D. N., & Halberstadt, J. (2017, June 08). A social Bouba/Kiki effect: A bias for people whose names match their faces. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-017-1304-x Images: https://synesthesia.com/blog/synesthesia/science-of-synesthesia/synesthesia-research-and-science/attachment/3/ https://www.wabisabilearning.com/blog/periodic-table-figures-of-speech-infographic
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