Dogs seem to agree with humans that 'bouba' is round and 'kiki' is spiky

What about kaka?

I mean, at least the way I imagine it, yeah. It instantly made me think of one of those spiky seed pods in my mouth.

> Or is that biased by having seen wavelengths?

You don't need to. They probably mean how rounded objects tend roll or slide, and spiky objects tend to scrape at most or dig into a crevice and so abruptly stop with a shorter sound.

Young kids follow our same expectations with kiki and bouba. They haven't seen wave traces.

There’s an overlap, but the observation from the parent comment turns this widely cited phenomenon from a supposed mystery or deep insight into something trivial.

It’s like observing that humans across cultures agree that the word “woof” refers to a dog and the word “miaw” refers to a cat… no shit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_scroll

Because sounds are made by shapes. The shapes of our mouths and the shapes of objects colliding. And sounds have shapes, shapes over time.

Maybe because when you pronounce a B, it's very hard to make it sound sharp. The lips rolling off one another naturally have a gentle ramp-up. It's really hard to have a sudden transient. You can record this in a free DAW and see it in front of you.

By contrast, it's very hard to make a K- sound without a sharp transient.

With B you are adding pressure to two soft tissues in contact.

With K you are adding pressure when one tissue is hard, and saliva is present (causing a relatively sudden production of the sound).

Try making B sound sharp, hard to do while saying Bouba.

Try making K sound soft, basically impossible, especially while saying Kiki.

Either similar underlying processing machinery (due to auditory and visual processing evolving from simpler and more interconnected processing circuits) or because when thinking of frequencies of waveforms in light/sound, visual sharpness and auditory sharpness really are the same thing (so even if they didn't co-evolve, it can be more efficient or useful to have some single underlying representation waveform representation that represents these things similarly).

tbf for me the Bouba evokes curvature because it makes me think of a Baobab tree. Not so sure about the dogs :)

Irish cíocha, and Japanese chichi (BC diet?)

Just your average run of the mill HN serial killer.

Dog owners are really scared of runners.

I am just running at park every morning, nothing crazy like randomly assaulting strangers!

I didn't choose the wug life, the wug life chose me.

Definitely. Something more onomatopoeiac like Chinese would be much clearer.

Sure it is. Fourier transform - Bouba and Kiki are far from the same there. And as someone else mentioned, time domain content - attack and decay. There are physical differences in the sounds which are pretty fundamental and can be definitionally linked to sharpness and softness across domains, especially as sharp objects are defined in nearly exactly the same way (except spatially).

It would be more interesting if we had two sounds which didn’t have such apparent objective differences giving rise to specific and universal subjective differences, or if something that was not so cross domain elicited a different response, e.g. linking volume with sharpness as opposed to something like size.

It isn't trivially obvious, no, but the "k" sound is a fricative (EDIT: oops, nope, plosive - see response to this comment), i.e. the tongue rapidly moves close to the palate and then away, creating turbulence, and sounds with a sharp peak and amplitude. I.e. the waveform of a "k" or "kiki" sound looks more spiky. The opposite is the case for the "bouba" sound.

It is a bit mysterious why animals would all map e.g. sharp auditory waveforms to sharper / spiky lines (kiki figure), and then smoother sounds to smoother lineforms (bouba figure), but, reasonably, these senses evolved together and used far more shared underlying processing machinery than they do presently. After all, both light and sound reach us in waves and both carry energy.

Some primitive mush-blob perhaps just started processing all incoming energy waves together, differentiating e.g. smoother vs. more staccatto waves before making the distinction between e.g. sound vs. light. Or I dunno, but IMO it makes more sense when you consider evolution, and don't just look at processing now in isolation from the likely development of these senses.

When I want to avoid startling my cat I make sure that the sound of my presence is gradual and not sudden. The syllables of a bouba word all introduce themselves smoothly and not suddenly.

I’ll rush to posit something for others to poke holes in: the definition of a Kiki word is a word where the syllables have a sudden “attack” then decay. And that’s a function of sound, not language.

How about high frequency sounds? Kiki must be higher frequency on a spectrograph. Spikes make high frequency sounds when they hit against things. Soft round objects make low frequency noises. Sort of. (There's holes in this theory, because fur is soft but makes high frequency sounds when brushed.)

>It's not actually trivially obvious that different minds would agree on how "sharp" and "soft" apply to sounds and to shapes.

Same genetics produce the same outcome (mostly).

When I studied psychology 20 years ago we had a class which covered this, and at least then there were studies indeed showing these associations are exactly due to these phonetic identifiers.

They've shifted their em-dash usage to the british standard (any dash+spacing on either side for no discernable reason—probablt a typesetting detail that hasn't made sense forever) and it looks like shit. I know, like other british standards—it's still sad to see.

We're about to land in kaka territory with this one.