Do the sounds have shapes???

            Since long time, there is always a question raised that, ‘What is the origin of the language?’. This question has attracted a lot of attention in the field of psychology too. Psychologists have always wondered about how the human creates a word. When we give a name to something does that sound is all random or is there some logic behind it ? Can humans visualize the sound? Does a human visualize the sound?

           To find answers to all these questions and to find whether the language is arbitrary (random) or non-arbitrary[3] there are some experiments done in psychology. One of these experiments is Kiki/Bouba effect. This was first performed by the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in 1929. The experiment was simple. A group of people were asked to give a name either ‘Takete’ or ‘malumba’ to the shown shape. Some of the shown shapes were bubbly curvy round and some of them were spiky and pointy with sharp edges. Though the names don’t mean anything, 95% of the participants choose name ‘Malumba’ for the round objects and ‘Takete’ for spiky objects.[2] 

Later in 2001,the same experiment was done by  VS Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard using the words ‘Kiki’ and ‘Bouba’. This time, the participants were American undergraduate students and Tamil speakers in India. Though the words and participants were changed, the result remain same. About 95% to 98% students selected ‘Kiki’ for spiky objects and ‘Bouba’ for round objects.[1]

             From both the experiments, it is observed that people relate harder sounds or forceful sounds with sharp spiky objects and relatively softer sounds with round, bubbly objects. It also depends upon the shape of the mouth while making the sound. As you can see, to pronounce ‘Bouba’ you make your mouth round like ‘O’. on the other hand, to pronounce ‘Kiki’ , you require to make sharp moment of tongue. The actual reason behind this is still not confirmed but many psychologists believe that it is a case of synesthesia. Synesthesia means the mixture of any two senses. Like, testing the colors or relating shapes with different touch senses. In this case, relating shapes with the sound. The recent study shows that this effect is even noticed in the children of age 2.5 years.  The study also shows that there are more chances of damage to the ‘angular gyrus’ part in the brain (part of the brain related to the language) in those who fail to match the ‘Bouba’ with round and ‘Kiki’ with spiky objects.[1]

             To study this effect and to reconfirm the results, we did a survey on 102 people in the age group of 18 to 25. We asked 4 different questions to these people and collected the answers.

The 1^st question was,

 In this question, given shape was asked to relate with either one of the names. Out of 102 people, 71 people answered ‘Kiki’ and remaining 31 answered ‘Bouba’.

Here is the summary,

                                                                 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Although the standard result is of 88%, we get 69.6 %  people answering with ‘Kiki’. 

The 2^nd question was,

 In this question also, the previous question is repeated with names ‘Malumba’ and ‘Takete’. This time, the bubbly shape was asked to relate with either one of those names. Out of 102, 84 people answered ‘Malumba’ and remaining 18 answered ‘Takete’.

The summary is,

This result almost match with the standard one.

The 3^rd question was,

This question is exact opposite of the first two. In this question, the given name was asked to match with either one of the shapes. Out of 102, 66 people choose option 1 and remaining 36 choose option 2.

This result also shows some deviation from the standard result.

The 4^th question was,

       This question is different from the first 3 questions. It is designed to study whether it is consonant in the word or the vowel which decides the relation with the shape. In simple words, do we relate shape according to the movement or shape of the mouth  while pronouncing a word or according the forcefulness in the voice.

In this example, you can see that ‘Kouka’ has the letter ‘K’ which is a sharp sound, but it also contains vowels ‘O’ and ‘U’ because of which we make  mouth round shape while pronouncing.

      Similarly, ‘Bee-Bee’ has soft sound in ‘B’ but because of ‘E’, the shape of mouth is flat.

The standard result says, it mostly depends upon the consonants. Meaning, most of the people will relate the given shape with ‘Bee-Bee’. But our survey shows a little different result. The number of people selecting ‘Bee-Bee’ are greater than those who selected ‘Kouka’, but the difference is very less. Out of 102 people, 57 people selected ‘Bee-Bee’ and remaining 45 people selected ‘Kouka’.

            Here, you can see 55.9% people selected ‘Bee-Bee’ and 44.1% selected ‘Kouka’.

From this survey, you can see that the results are little deviated from the standard results and the deviation in the last one is considerable. Though the actual reason behind this is unknown, this might be the effect of selected age group and an individual’s personality.

As you can see, Kiki-Bouba effect is one of the most interesting effects in psychology and very deep study has been done in this field. Compared to that, this is just an overview of the topic. I hope this will help you to better understanding of the effect and increasing enthusiasm in psychology. Happy Learning!

References:

[1] https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2016/oct/17/the-boubakiki-effect-how-do-we-link-shapes-to-sounds

[3] Reilly J, Hung J, Westbury C , Non-Arbitrariness in Mapping Word Form to Meaning: Cross-Linguistic Formal Markers of Word Concreteness, 2017