What a Shape Sounds Like - excerpt from Psy-Q

What a Shape Sounds Like One of these shapes is a kiki. The other is a bouba. Which do you think is which? Why?

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a ns wer The first is the bouba, the second the kiki, right?

While there is, of course, no ‘right’ answer, this is the answer generally given by around  per cent of participants. Somehow, the bou sound just feels rounded, while the ki sound feels sharp and jagged.

Where do these feelings come from? Perhaps we are making associations with familiar English words. Bouba sounds a little like ‘balloon’ (or even – Ooh, Matron! - ‘booby’), while kiki sounds almost exactly like ‘key, key’, and keys do tend to be rather angular (at least, at the business end). Or maybe the associations come from writing? The ou sound of bouba is written with rounded letters, while the k of kiki is angular.

While these associations are probably playing some small role in this specific example, they don’t tell the whole story. For one thing, we still get the effect if we replace them with other words that don’t sound particularly like any real English words (e.g., which is the takete and which is the maluma?). For another, we still get the effect if we test speakers of other languages with very different vocabulary and written scripts to English (e.g, Swahili, Bantu and Tamil), or even two-year-old children, who have not yet learned to read at all.

So why do so many languages share these same sound–shape correspondences? Think about the shape of your mouth when you produce these sounds: a big, open, round mouth for bouba versus a small opening with your lips stretched thinly for kiki. One popular theory, then, is that the bouba/kiki effect is caused by connections in the brain between areas that process visual input – including both shapes on the printed page and shapes formed by speakers’ lips – and areas that are responsible for perceiving and producing speech sounds. Words like bouba literally ‘feel’ round, because you can feel your lips forming a round shape when you say them.

We see these types of effect with some real English words too.

For example, words such as large, huge and enormous involve opening wide our lips or entire mouths, whereas little, tiny, mini, petite, 202

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itsy-bitsy, teenie-weenie (yellow polka-dot bikini) involve stretching our lips to make a tiny gap. This may be one reason why retailers prefer prices that end in . When you say, for example, ‘one ninety-nine’, you are not only making these tiny sounds, but even saying the word ‘teenie’ (well, almost), as opposed to producing a big, booming TWO pounds.

Could there be links between other sensory modalities? If shapes have sounds, can they have tastes too? . . .

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