The bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems

Aleksandra Ćwiek (1) , Susanne Fuchs (2) , Christoph Draxler (3) , Eva Liina Asu (4) , Dan Dediu (5) , Katri Hiovain (6) , Shigeto Kawahara (2) , Sofia Koutalidis (7) , Manfred Krifka (1) , Pärtel Lippus (4) , Gary Lupyan (8) , Grace E Oh (9) , Jing Paul (10) , Caterina Petrone (11) , Rachid Ridouane (12) , Sabine Reiter (13) , Nathalie Schümchen (8) , Ádám Szalontai (14) , Özlem Ünal-Logacev (15) , Jochen Zeller (16) , Marcus Perlman (17) , Bodo Winter (17)

1 HU Berlin - Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin = Humboldt University of Berlin = Université Humboldt de Berlin
2 Keio University [Tokyo]
3 Universität Bielefeld = Bielefeld University
4 University of Tartu
5 DDL - Dynamique Du Langage
6 Helsingin yliopisto = Helsingfors universitet = University of Helsinki
7 Universität Bielefeld
8 SDU - University of Southern Denmark
9 Konkuk University [Seoul]
10 Agnes Scott College
11 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage
12 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018
13 UFPR - Universidade Federal do Parana [Curitiba]
14 Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics
15 Istanbul Medipol University
16 UKZN - University of KwaZulu-Natal [Durban, Afrique du Sud]
17 University of Birmingham [Birmingham]

The bouba/kiki effect—the association of the nonce word bouba with a round shape and kiki with a spiky shape—is a type of correspondence between speech sounds and visual properties with potentially deep implications for the evolution of spoken language. However, there is debate over the robustness of the effect across cultures and the influence of orthography. We report an online experiment that tested the bouba/kiki effect across speakers of 25 languages representing nine language families and 10 writing systems. Overall, we found strong evidence for the effect across languages, with bouba eliciting more congruent responses than kiki. Participants who spoke languages with Roman scripts were only marginally more likely to show the effect, and analysis of the orthographic shape of the words in different scripts showed that the effect was no stronger for scripts that use rounder forms for bouba and spikier forms for kiki. These results confirm that the bouba/kiki phenomenon is rooted in crossmodal correspondence between aspects of the voice and visual shape, largely independent of orthography. They provide the strongest demonstration to date that the bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems.

Mots clés: cognition perception; crossmodal association; iconicity; universals; sound symbolism

Domaines: Sciences cognitives

Aleksandra Ćwiek, Susanne Fuchs, Christoph Draxler, Eva Liina Asu, Dan Dediu, et al.. The bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2021, 377 (1841), ⟨10.1098/rstb.2020.0390⟩. ⟨hal-03426226⟩