11–20 of 176 posts
What about the effect where for some pairs of words that don't theoretically have ordering preference (kiki/bouba vs bouba/kiki), (plus/minus vs minus/plus), (on/off vs off/on), (positive/negative vs negative/positive) have some psychological order that most people use and if the other ordering is used, it sound weird? Does this effect have a name?
What about the effect where for some pairs of words that don't theoretically have ordering preference (kiki/bouba vs bouba/kiki), (plus/minus vs minus/plus), (on/off vs off/on), (positive/negative vs negative/positive) have some psychological order that most people use and if the other ordering is used, it sound weird? Does this effect have a name?
What about the effect where for some pairs of words that don't theoretically have ordering preference (kiki/bouba vs bouba/kiki), (plus/minus vs minus/plus), (on/off vs off/on), (positive/negative vs negative/positive) have some psychological order that most people use and if the other ordering is used, it sound weird? Does this effect have a name?
What about the effect where for some pairs of words that don't theoretically have ordering preference (kiki/bouba vs bouba/kiki), (plus/minus vs minus/plus), (on/off vs off/on), (positive/negative vs negative/positive) have some psychological order that most people use and if the other ordering is used, it sound weird? Does this effect have a name?
Leaving aside the effect of prosody mentioned in another comment, I think the rest of it is habit, together with the brain's tendency to group things. If you're used to hearing "plus or minus", your brain may be grouping it together into a phrase whose meaning you understand directly without decomposition, so if you hear "minus or plus" there's a moment of having to map the components to the composite meaning, together with wondering if the speaker intends the difference to have a meaning.
(In mathematics, there's a reason to have both ± and ∓, since you can use them both in the same equation when you need "minus when the other one is plus, and plus when the other one is minus". For instance, a±b∓c means "a+b-c or a-b+c".)
I don't know if this has a name, but if it does I'd love to know it.
The waveforms for "Bouba" are less "spiky" I'd guess: fewer overtones, less noisy, more tonal, so more round and quasi periodical
What about the effect where for some pairs of words that don't theoretically have ordering preference (kiki/bouba vs bouba/kiki), (plus/minus vs minus/plus), (on/off vs off/on), (positive/negative vs negative/positive) have some psychological order that most people use and if the other ordering is used, it sound weird? Does this effect have a name?
I've noticed that comparing languages - e.g. in Hebrew they say "less or more" instead of the English "more or less".
The Reggio Emilia exhibit featured children performing a cross-modal exercise of drawing the sounds of various types of shoes walking down stairs to illustrate the "Hundred Languages of Children" concept. It showed how kids translate auditory experiences into visual ones - high heels would been drawn with spikey patterns and construction boots would be big wavey ones. This is reminiscent of the Bouba-Kiki effect. But other smaller nuances such as duration translating to span and loudness to magnitude.
I took away a fascinating insight from childhood cognition: children effortlessly bridge sensory modalities, an ability that often diminishes in adults to the point that asking an adult to “draw this sound” or “build something that feels like this smell” is met with a blank look but which a child is often completely game to try. Tasking an adult with a cross-modal assignment literally does not compute.
This cross-modal perception revealed that children possess a remarkable synesthetic intuition, using diverse forms of expression to understand and interpret the world—an ability I had completely forgotten as an adult, which hindered my communication with young children in early education environments.
It highlighted the importance of nurturing cross modal communication styles and once one notices it (like in say Mr. Rogers opening ritual to use multiple queues to engage children’s parasympathetic nervous system) one unlocks a whole new vocabulary with not just children but adults. It’s been a powerful tool in my creative toolbox since.
The waveforms for "Bouba" are less "spiky" I'd guess: fewer overtones, less noisy, more tonal, so more round and quasi periodical
this implies that humans have an intuitive sense of the shape of the waveform, which I think would be surprising!! And also empirically testable (not saying you're wrong, but it's not necessarily obvious to me as true. The sound is a vibration/signal, how our brains interpret it may have no correlation to its "shape". Do we have an intuition for "spiky" electromagnetic signals? maybe we do, that's why looking at natu…
But I guess you were getting at some sort of synaesthesia?
Indeed an interesting question how that is related.
I was referring to waveforms because of the duality with sound
HN is kiki
But that post did make me think of this effect, especially as another character in the game is named "Keke"
What about the effect where for some pairs of words that don't theoretically have ordering preference (kiki/bouba vs bouba/kiki), (plus/minus vs minus/plus), (on/off vs off/on), (positive/negative vs negative/positive) have some psychological order that most people use and if the other ordering is used, it sound weird? Does this effect have a name?
Yes, there's a Vsauce short about that, but given the amount of them there's no way I'll find it... Edit, found it another way: "Irreversible binomial" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_binomial