Bouba... a woody sort of word.
Bouba/Kiki Effect
41–50 of 98 posts
Re: Bouba/Kiki Effect
#42There's a Tom Scott video about this with some further academic references: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TDIAObsqcs Bouba/kiki is most likely a specific instance of the more general notion of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism . Another well-known cross-linguistic association is the one between front vowels and small objects on one hand, and back vowels and large objects on the other.
'Symbolism' is a terrible word to describe something like this. Symbols are convention and can change. This is the opposite - an innate cross-sensory connection that will not change.
Does a lion symbolize something fierce? The Book of Isaiah notwithstanding, I doubt that symbol will change.
Re: Bouba/Kiki Effect
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
'Symbolism' is a terrible word to describe something like this. Symbols are convention and can change. This is the opposite - an innate cross-sensory connection that will not change.
Does a lion symbolize something fierce? The Book of Isaiah notwithstanding, I doubt that symbol will change.
A lion IS something fierce. But only its use in western history make it a symbol of that. There's plenty of other fierce creatures (e.g. an orca, a crocadile, a poisonous frog) that wouldn't conjure the same symbolism.
Re: Bouba/Kiki Effect
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does a lion symbolize something fierce? The Book of Isaiah notwithstanding, I doubt that symbol will change.
A lion IS something fierce. But only its use in western history make it a symbol of that. There's plenty of other fierce creatures (e.g. an orca, a crocadile, a poisonous frog) that wouldn't conjure the same symbolism.
It’s structurally the same. You can choose a lion, a wolf, a shark, etc, but it is not arbitrary that you choose some such animal to symbolize ferocity, and not a rabbit.
There’s some bias to associate sounds with particular images or concepts, but we have different languages because we don’t choose the same words.
If anything, the consistency of symbolism is much greater than inter-linguistic consistency of how words sound.
Re: Bouba/Kiki Effect
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lion IS something fierce. But only its use in western history make it a symbol of that. There's plenty of other fierce creatures (e.g. an orca, a crocadile, a poisonous frog) that wouldn't conjure the same symbolism.
It’s structurally the same. You can choose a lion, a wolf, a shark, etc, but it is not arbitrary that you choose some such animal to symbolize ferocity, and not a rabbit. There’s some bias to associate sounds with particular images or concepts, but we have different languages because we don’t choose the same words. If anything, the consistency of symbolism is much greater than inter-linguistic consistency of how word…
I don't understand what point you are trying to make. You seem to have made exactly mine. Symbolism is a choice. The Bouba/Kiki thing is not.
Re: Bouba/Kiki Effect
#46I've wondered if languages which "score" well in leveraging this sort of mapping just make it easier to juggle complex subjects by using more "efficient" parts of our mental stack that position conversation to go deeper on any point of interest just because it's less energy intensive or something along those lines. Something akin to a mental locality of concepts if you will. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_e…
ps it's a joy to watch VS Ramachandran get excited about synesthesia, definitely worth hunting down videos of him on YouTube.
Yes, absolutely! I loved listening to the Reith lectures many, many years ago, when Vilayanur Ramachandran gave them. You can still listen to them here, http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/
In Lecture 4 (Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese) he talks about the Kiki / Bouba effect. His enunciation is amazing.
Re: Bouba/Kiki Effect
#47This is how I remember numbers, spelling, and names sometimes. A sequence of numbers has a nice plot / wave to it. I can't say my mapping from these categories to shapes generalizes for anyone else and it hasn't made me particularly good at memory competitions. It's just how it works. Also, memorizing a couple of credit card's information has saved me so much time -- highly recommended.
This is intriguing, can you describe in more detail how you map a series of numbers to a shape/sound? like is 1234 a slope / ?
Yes. In fact there's almost no "entropy" to remember in 1234 because it perfectly matches a 45 deg slope. I just have to remember it starts at ground and has length 4.
A seq like 1244 has a bit more entropy with the "bump" where the 3 should be, so it's easier to see it as a slope of length 2 starting at 12, or some "busy-beaver" like sequence that starts gradual and curves rapidly up to 44. The bump at 3 seems most natural.
A long sequence of numbers looks like monotonically increasing groups or strings, and the curve is easy to remember. Is it a log-like plot, a hyperbolic curve, parabola, saw tooth, line, etc? I usually end up finding a curve that has fewer deviations and matches the numbers nicely. I just have to remember how long each sequence was.
Like this:
1234567788100
is
1/7, length 7. 77/99, length 3, except +1 where the 99 should be. It's kind of clumsy with text, easier with pictures and dots, like seeing wood grain or stars. All you need is the "origin" coordinate frame. There's still numbers, but the lines help keep the memory of the relationship more natural.
Words are the same. Sounds angle up and down and squiggle back sometimes. It's why my handwriting is so terrible I think. Probably this is how shorthand was developed, so I don't think it's all that unique to me.
From there, numbers->sounds is easy enough but never helped me remember things. What helps is the ridge-lines and parabolas.
Re: Bouba/Kiki Effect
#48I don't get it? What's the significance of this? I thought the left one is bam/pow and the right one is a blob?
From the article: Without being told which shape was which, > 95% to 98% selected the curvy shape as "bouba" and the jagged one as "kiki", suggesting that the human brain somehow attaches abstract meanings to the shapes and sounds in a consistent way So apart from visually impaired (from birth) people, we may have a pattern in mapping shapes to phonemes.
Why did I choose something else??
Re: Bouba/Kiki Effect
#49Ramachandran and Hubbard suggest that the kiki/bouba effect has implications for the evolution of language, because it suggests that the naming of objects is not completely arbitrary. Well, no shit - that's why we refer to onomatopoeia, a word which probably has far wider currency than others of similar provenance like poiesis. I'll add a conjecture that similar disparities exist in vowels, with e and i being conside…
> Well, no shit,... It is fascinating how many science grants we could save on if we just asked HN commenters to describe the world. To think that we might have reached such knowledge about human beings by just asking HN to tell us about the world. Eat your heart out, Karl Popper. It appears that Keats wins the day.
You jest, but there’s some sobering truth to the reality that knowledge is not readily distributed amongst humanity.
Some here in the US were searching for organic solutions to eliminating plastic waste, but there was a whole demographic that said, “Well, duh” when it was discovered that a particular worm ate plastic. For them it was just a part of observational life.
Re: Bouba/Kiki Effect
#50Cool to see this on HN -- I wrote a program for a psych lab in college that was exploring this effect. The idea was to see if homogenous sensory stimuli had a faster reaction time & accuracy compared to disparate ones.
eg. Was the response to [ Bouba-like image + Bouba-like audio ] faster/more accurate than [ Bouba-like image + Kiki-like audio ]
Seemed like it may provide some insight into speech perception and synesthesia.