Which is "Bouba", and which is "Kiki"? [video]

4 comments

• basilikum 6 days ago
  Here is the Wikipedia article about the phenomenon of the bouba–kiki effect if you prefer text form or want to know more about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba%2Fkiki_effect
• BrenBarn 1 hour ago
  This phenomenon of "sound symbolism" has received a lot of research attention in the last 10 years or so. For a long time it was considered a curiosity at best, and a total red herring at worst, but a lot of evidence is accumulating that sound symbolic effects are very real and may have profound implications for our understanding of sensorimotor cognition.
• viraptor 6 days ago
  One of my favourite nerdy jokes is that the Fourier transform is a bouba-kiki transform.
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  • slfreference 5 minutes ago
    I think this indicates the features from vision and audio got aligned properly and hence we know what is what intuitively.
• cung 1 hour ago
  The shapes just look like the letters. K’s have sharp corners, B’s are round.
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  • canjobear 1 hour ago
    The effect replicates in languages with other writing systems.
  • markburns 1 hour ago
    That seems to me like it just shifts the problem one level. Why are K's and Kikis spiky and why are B's and Boubas round. Why is it universal too across people with different writing systems and languages.
  • chrismorgan 40 minutes ago
    In Telugu, k is one of the smoother letters: కి (ki: the squiggle at the top is the i vowel sign).
  • carabiner 57 minutes ago
    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23121711/
  • GrowingSideways 1 hour ago
    Interesting. Who would have thought that the human brain could have predicted latin script aeons before it existed?